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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ; 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ! 



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THE GOSPEL 
OF THE INCARNATION 



BY 



/ 



WILLIAM FREDERIC FABER 

AUTHOR OP " THE CHURCH FOR THE TIMES " 



NEW YORK 



ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND COMPANY 

(I>'CORPORATED) 

182 Fifth A>'enue 






:3'^ 






Copyright^ 1893, 

By Anson D. F. Randolph and Company, 

(incorporated.) 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO 



Professor CHARLES W. SHIELDS, D.D, LL.D., 

WHOSE DEVOUT AND CATHOLIC SPIRIT HAS ENLISTED A RARE 

SCH,OLARSHIP AND A GIFTED PEN IN THE 

SERVICE OF CHRISTIAN UNITY, 

(SiW %ittlt %tstih ij5 iJBratefuHp 5^etiicateti. 



CONTENTS. 



» 

PAGE 

I. The Kingdom of God . . , 7 

11. The Kingdom of God within us .... 19 

III. The Kingdom of God coming on Earth . 31 

IV. The Universal Kingdom of God .... 45 
V. Great Joy to All People 61 

VI. The Human Life Divine 77 

VII. Pure Religion 93 

VIII. The Price and the Purchase 109 

IX. An Easter Summons 125 

X. Our Ascended Lord 141 

XL The Spirit of Pentecost 155 

XII. Contending for the Faith 171 



I. 

€lje Jiitigtiom of aBob. 



And in those days cometh John the Baptist, preaching 
in the wilderness of Judsea, saying, Repent ye ; for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand. — Matt. iii. l , 2. 

Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into 
Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time 
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, 
and believe in the gospel. — Mark i. 14, 15. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

OUR religious vocabulary abounds in terms 
which, through long and often inapt use, 
have lost their original distinctness and power. 
Like gold pieces from which image and super- 
scription have been effaced, they must be sent 
back to the mint of thought to be recoined, ere 
they can be of full value. 

An instance in point is this very familiar ex- 
pression, *^the kingdom of God.'' Few phrases 
have wider currency ; few, we might add, have 
more sadly degenerated into cant. But, even 
where we may not justly suspect cant, where 
it is used with evident sincerity out of an honest 
heart, how far it commonly is from expressing 
any single, definite, and adequate idea! To put 
the matter to the test, take the familiar verse, 
St. Matthew vi. 33 : '' Seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and his righteousness, and all these 
things shall be added unto you.'' I ask the 
question, "In what direction shall I look for 
this kingdom ? " There are some who will an- 
swer, "The future world; heaven." They think 



10 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

that the Saviour enjoins upon men to prepare for 
the hereafter, and He will the while care for their 
earthly maintenance. But though I will agree 
that this earth is not all, that a fuller and higher 
life awaits us after this present, and shall not be 
entered save by the pure and righteous, it seems to 
me that no one can read the record of John the 
Baptist's preaching, and of our Lord's at His first 
public appearance, and yet hold that the "king- 
dom" is postponed to another world. Others 
there are who, impatient of such postponement, 
tell us, "The kingdom of God is here; Christ 
established it, gave it organization and ordinances 
and promise of perpetuity; the kingdom of God 
for us here is the Church : and our first duty is to 
find our place within her, and take up the service 
of Christ in her membership." Now while we 
believe with all our heart in " the Holy Catholic 
Church," and cheerfully assent to every proper 
claim urged on her behalf, again it must be said 
that in the Gospels " Church " and " kingdom of 
God " cannot be taken as interchangeable. But 
there are still others who zealously make reply, 
" The kingdom of God is within you ; ye must be 
born again; this must be your first and all-ab- 
sorbing concern." Grant that rightly understood 
such an answer gives us the key to every God-ward 
and man-ward duty. The trouble is, those who 
most loudly assert this truth are commonly the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 11 

most superficial and mechanical interpreters of it ; 
a " change of heart," to use the familiar phrase, 
is by them often held equivalent to character 
and conduct both, when in reality it compasses 
neither, but is only a surface emotionalism. 
Moreover, granting the genuineness of it, the 
'^ kingdom within you " will not suffice to cover 
all which the Gospels compel us to include in the 
*' kingdom of God." 

Satisfied that these popular conceptions, even 
when they are as definite as this, give us no ade- 
quate account of the great Reality proclaimed 
by John the Baptist and by our Blessed Lord 
Himself, let us strike out for ourselves, to 
reach if we may some satisfactory view of this 
Kmgdom. 

We may say^ in passing, that no reader who 
will attend to the parallel accounts of St. Mat- 
thew and St. Mark can fail to note that where 
the former writes '' kingdom of heaven," the lat- 
ter writes ^* kingdom of God." Evidently they 
stand for exactly the same thing, — " heaven " 
deriving all its significance from the fact of its 
being viewed as the dwelling-place of God, the 
realm where He is all in all. It will be sufficient, 
therefore, if we study the more common phrase, 
the ^^ kingdom of God." 

In one sense, the kingdom of God extends over 
all the universe, for in heaven and earth He is 



12 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

supreme. In that sense there is no room for the 
petition, ^^Thy kingdom come/' nor for the an- 
nouncement, '^The kingdom is at hand." Evi- 
dently this ^*' kingdom'' which we are to seek 
stands not upon the Almightiness of God. May 
we not say that it is rather the willing acknowl- 
edgment of His kingship^ the cordial acceptance 
of His rule ? And looking at the matter in this 
light, does not God's kingship mean the enthrone- 
ment of His character ; does not His rule mean 
conformity to Himself? What, then, is that 
character ? What is He ? 

Questions like these it behooves us to approach 
reverently, avoiding the presumptuous familiarity 
with which men sometimes speak of the plans 
and the attributes of the Almighty as though 
they had comprehended them all. Yet we may 
speak confidently. Whatever else He be beyond 
our ken, we know that God is Righteousness, and 
Truth, and Love ; apart from qualities like these 
it is impossible for us to conceive of God as God 
at all. And the kingdom of God — whatever 
else it may be — is the enthronement of Kight- 
eousness, and Truth, and Love. To be in that 
kingdom is to be under the willing dominion of 
these ; to own them for Master Principles, and 
seek them in all things more and more. As 
George Eliot makes Savonarola say : " Necessity 
is laid on me, which I dare not gainsay, to preach 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 13 

this Gospel of God's kingdom, as, even on earth, 
a kingdom of righteousness, truth, and love." 

Let no one suppose that these are abstractions 
of the lecture-room or study. Kighteousness, 
what is it but that fundamental Rightness which 
a soul sound at the core will see and acknowledge, 
yea, vehemently assert, though it were in the 
midst of darkness and struggle like that of Abra- 
ham ? — " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right ? " Truth, what is it but that elemental 
Reality and Genuineness to which we are ever 
appealing against the shams and hollowness and 
insincerities of the world ? — as when Carlyle 
cries out, " Fool ! the Eternal is no simulacrum ! " 
Love, last and best word of all, what is it but 
this that has left its witness in every human 
heart, drawing upon it like a yet undiscovered 
Planetary Force, left out of reckoning by Un- 
belief; what is it but this which opens lips 
unused to prayer to cry out in time of darkness 
and trouble to Him as to One who cares ? Of 
which a seer sings : — 

'* I have gone the whole round of creation ; I saw and I spoke. 
I, a work of God^s hand for that purpose, received in my 

brain 
And pronounced on the rest of His hand work — returned 

Him again 
His creation's approval or censure ; I spoke as I saw. 
I report, as a man may of God's work — all 's love, yet all 's 

law." 



14 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

The kingdom of such a God we may well ex- 
pect to be no mere name, or theory, or sentiment; 
but; where it has truly come, a most mighty Fact, 
a most Blessed Eeality ! 

And therefore our Lord brings to men the an- 
nouncement of this kingdom as a ^^ gospel of 
God," a piece of good news from heaven. Through 
it better things were in store for all who would 
make ready for them. For the men of Jesus' day 
were looking, as men always have looked, as men 
are still looking, for a better future. To be sure, 
men's notions of that better future have differed 
infinitely. At that time and in that land they 
were looking for the restoration of David's throne 
and the recovery of their national independence 
and their former greatness. In other times and 
other lands it has been the overthrow of some 
hated despotism, the elevation of some class, the 
expansion of industry or commerce, the extension 
of common education, the development of letters 
and the arts, the perfection of legislative or judi- 
cial or executive machinery; according to their 
times, their training, their breadth of vision, their 
condition morally, intellectually, socially, indus- 
trially, they have pictured that better future 
under one or another to them attractive guise. 
History is one long succession of examples. As 
to external and material improvement, the desires 
of one generation become the attainments of the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 15 

next ; is the happy time brought nearer ? A hun- 
dred years have witnessed what vast changes in 
all the conditions of man^s natural life and en- 
vironment ! — are men as a whole happier ? Is the 
craving satisfied, is the expectation met ? Things 
earnestly desired in the eighteenth century, men 
have now, in the nineteenth ; is all well ? Is it a 
mere accident that the generation which has wit- 
nessed material invention and achievement, mate- 
rial expansion and progress unparalleled through 
the centuries, should be flooded with a literature 
the saddest, most depressing, disillusionizing, pes- 
simistic ? Drinking our fill of the wealth of 
things, is it strange that so many of us should 
begin to be sceptical as to whether there will be 
a better future at all, having ourselves found that 
increase of things will not bring it? 

Wherein, ultimately and essentially, must the 
satisfactions of the better future consist ? Must 
they not have respect to what is divinest in man, 
unlikest the brute ; must they not be satisfactions 
of the spirit? This Jesus of Nazareth, then, 
whose voice men would not or could not hear be- 
cause of the din they made in heralding their 
manifold world-improvement schemes, — has He 
not, perhaps, after all, the most practical way to 
the better future ? How well we know that apart 
from advance in goodness no advance in the " arts 
of living" has ever really lifted men or made 



16 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

life richer to them ! How well we know that in- 
creased intelligence without increased goodness 
has imperilled and debased peoples, rather than 
strengthened and exalted them! How well we 
know that "institutions'' bestowed in hope of 
conferring freedom and happiness have led to pre- 
cisely the opposite result when there has been no 
corresponding character in the recipients ! Could 
we to-day feed every human being on the globe, 
house comfortably every family, set every man 
his fitting task with just compensation, give each 
his part in civic privilege, each an honorable recog- 
nition and reception in society,. and to all the re- 
fining influences of libraries and art galleries with 
doors wide open, — and add to these whatever 
else from the long catalogue of "Civilization'' you 
may choose — would in all these have come the 
better day for the human race ? There may be 
those who think so; but they err. One thing, as 
men are, would be lacking — character. The ar- 
rangements might be perfect; but, while men 
were what they are, the arrangements could not 
last. Or, compelled to remain in what they were 
not fitted for, their misery and chagrin would but 
be the greater. 

This Jesus, then, — does He not care for the 
amelioration of human existence ? Food, raiment, 
shelter, — knowledge, beauty, social joys, and civic 
rights — are they nothing to him ? Let us never 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 17 

forget that the Son of Man came eating and 
drinking, and that it was He who said, " Render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." We have 
misread His life if we suppose Him indifferent to 
the wrong w^hich defrauds any human being of 
any rightful privilege or pleasure ; if we suppose 
He regards with equanimity any system or state of 
things which deprives any man, woman, or child 
of the Father's intended gifts. But He will lay 
the chief stress upon the chief need. He will in- 
sist upon the essential thing. He bids you seek 
first that which is first, the kingdom of God. He 
does it for your sake. He knows that nothing 
will supply its place, if you lack that. He knows 
that there is no surer way to supply all other 
needful things, no other way to give those things 
any value and make them afford any satisfac- 
tion, than to liave, hold, and enjoy them under 
the kingdom of God. And this is no more true 
of the individual than it is of society. The only 
gospel for men, the only substantial promise of 
a really better future, is in that which Jesus 
preached. The Kingdom of God. 

Now, all this, it scarcely needs be said, is dif- 
ferent from our common way of thinking. Our 
failures we are wont to charge upon circum- 
stances, our unhappiness upon things outside 
ourselves. Change the circumstances, set things 
right ; to-morrow will be better ! Perhaps so — 

2 



18 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

if another thing have been set right first. Is 
God King ? Or^ in your inmost heart, is Self en- 
throned as King and God ? To the men of His 
time Jesus found it needful to say. Repent; a 
change of temper, a different attitude, a new out- 
look, was the most immediate want. Is it other- 
wise to-day ? Are men and women to-day of 
right temper, is their attitude right, their outlook 
right ? How great the change which most will 
have to undergo before we can answer in the aflB.r- 
mative ! Who will dare say it of himself ? 

Here, then, Jesus probes and touches to the 
quick the centre of all human infirmity, misery, 
and failure; if this can be healed, all can be 
healed. If men can be brought to a different mind, 
if they can be persuaded to dethrone self, and to 
bring all they are and all they have into glad sub- 
jection to Him who is Eighteousness and Truth 
and Love, and who desires only to order all lives 
and all things in accord with His Blessed Char- 
acter and for their own true good, — then is the 
better future indeed at hand, already begun. In 
due time every interest of life shall be lifted up^ 
and all shall be gladdened and strengthened by 
the health giving Spirit of our King. 



II. 

Cl^e ^bmgtiom of 45o0 l©ttljtn B^. 



And being asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom 
of God Cometh, He answered them and said. The kingdom 
of God Cometh not with observation: neither shall they 
say, Lo, here ! or, There ! for lo, the kingdom of God is 
within 1 you. — Luke xvii. 20, 21. 

1 Or, in the midst of you. — Margiual uote, Revised Ver- 
sion. 



II. 

THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

IT is a question not settled — one which per- 
haps never can be settled — whether the 
words of Jesus signify that the kingdom is 
within men, in their inner, hidden lives, or that 
it is among His contemiJoraries, '^ among you, 
even here to-day, if ye Pharisees could but see 
it.'' It might seem that if the latter were the 
true interpretation, we should quite lose our text, 
and in any case that our text is much weakened 
by the possible alternative. In reality it is, after 
all, but a small matter. Jesus discredits all the 
pomps and artificialities of outward circumstance. 
The kingdom. He would say, is not coming by 
armed revolution, by rehabilitation of ancient 
thrones and reinstatement of dynasties, nor by 
charters, constitutions, or outward schemes at 
all. Not with observation — with show; not to 
be pointed at as conspicuously here, or there : un- 
obtrusive, it shall be present where popular opin- 
ion is not chiefly intent on finding it. For men, 
as we have said, are always looking for the good 
time to come from new arrangements or new 



22 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

schemes, — political, industrial, social, religious ; 
the real good they overlook, the real principle of 
regeneration they pass by. This, we take it, — 
whatever a preposition in the text may mean, 
— this is the real significance of Jesus' words. 

How true, then, those words, in the light of 
what we have already urged. The Pharisee for- 
got that where God has His way, and there 
alone, is God's kingdom. Wherever men respect 
and cherish what is dear to God, wherever there 
is a genuine striving after righteousness and 
truth and love, there the kingdom of God has 
come, and is coming, and shall come in ever in- 
creasing splendor and power. Nicodemus needed, 
as all men need, to be born anew, to be born from 
above ; for without that he could not see the 
kingdom of God. Once for all, an enthusiasm 
cannot be compelled from without ; and to follow 
after righteousness and truth and love with the 
entire concentration of one's being, — this is 
nothing less than to be on fire with a new en- 
thusiasm. You can by outward force make a man 
submit to law, or pay a tax ; but by outward 
force you cannot make him love the law, nor con- 
vert the tax into an offering of his soul's affec- 
tion. God's kingdom — that is. His dominion — 
is so fine a thing, so inward, so delicate, so abso- 
lute, that it cannot be ushered in by the clumsy 
measures of human device, you may make men 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 23 

desist from wrong-doing, — pains and penalties 
or arguments of expediency may reach so far ; but 
that is not to make them love and strive after 
righteousness. You may contrive plans for the 
dissemination of knowledge, and bring various 
forms of pressure to bear on men to avail them- 
selves of opportunities to get information and 
education and learning ; but that will be power- 
less to effect a genuine love for truth. You may 
legislate and organize and reconstruct for the 
purpose of bettering industrial and social condi- 
tions, you may compel men to some sort of justice 
in dealing with their fellows, and it will be very 
good so far as it goes ; but you cannot compel 
them from their hearts to honor all men, and love 
their neighbor as themselves. There is, no doubt, 
very much of all these things which can be done, 
and should be done, and which is excellent in its 
place ; but put it all together, and it will produce 
but a negative sort of righteousness and truth and 
love. The kingdom of God, however, means the 
absolute enthronement of these in the soul of 
man ; man shall bow down to them and embrace 
them wdth his whole heart ; though there were 
no external constraint, though there were no 
penalty affixed, man must still do them because 
he himself freely chose them : this is the true 
kingdom of God over man, — none other is ; and 
this is, as we say, a matter of kingdom ivithin. 



24 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

Are not such all true supremacies which result 
in best service — kiiigdojns ivithin? Are not all 
the highest callings of men such as demand this 
sort of inner devotion, — we might almost say pas- 
sion, — if they are to be followed to any purpose ? 
The crowning achievements of the centuries, — 
which are held in immortal honor because they 
bear witness to the true glory of the race, — was 
it the fear of penalty or the hope of reward from 
which they sprang ? Indeed, are not the best 
things in every human life, — the things which, 
it may be at very rare intervals, show the true 
grandeur and the innate nobility of the man or the 
woman, — are they not such as come by an inner 
impulse, with a spontaneousness never seen in 
the ordinary mechanical routine and spiritless 
drudgery ? Shall we expect the life and activi- 
ties of a kingdom of God, if such there be, to fall 
below these in essential character ? Will God 
offer affront to the children of men capable of 
things so large and high, by exacting unwilling 
tribute from them, or accepting mere formal or 
grudging service? No ; He will take royal hom- 
age from you in the way most honorable to Him- 
self and you, as men yield freely of their best 
at the call of patriotism or of humanity, or to the 
lifelong service of the art they love, — so, or not 
at all. 

'^ My meat and drink is to do the will of Him 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 25 

that sent me." He that uttered these words 
is the same that heralded the kingdom of God ; 
He proclaimed it as now at hand, — at hand by 
reason of His coming. Where, then, — in His 
Messiahship ; in His Church ; in His Heaven, 
promised to the believing? 

Primarily, in none of these ; it is in Himself. 
It is, so simple is this truth, in His own perfect, 
God-devoted human life ; in His free, spontaneous 
obedience, in His lifelong, unwavering devotion to 
the Father's work, than which He had no other 
business on earth. The kingdom of God was 
verily within Him ; and there it was perfect. 

To eyes that can see, there is no more impres- 
sive spectacle than such a kingdom. It is not a 
trick of rhetoric when we say that the empires of 
earth dwindle in the comparison. It is true, in that 
" circle of lands '^ which had then been bound in 
a peace imposed by a resistless conquest, there 
was much to dazzle the imagination. The whole 
known world parcelled out in provinces, governed 
by the representatives of central Eome, covered 
with a network of those marvellous roads, 
watched by sleepless legionaries, — it was in its 
day a wonderful, and apparently indestructible, 
system. Yet how hollow in the hour of its seem- 
ingly absolute triumph ! how speedy its helpless 
overthrow! In the great Day of the Eternal, 
which is as a thousand years, what a mushroom 



26 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

growth such an earthly empire ! How unsubstan- 
tial as a dream, how weak the bond, how ineffec- 
tual the rule, which attempted to hold together this 
mass, and presumed to make it a kingdom ! Such 
is your kingdom without, — your world-empire. 

Contrast another with it, — one contemporane- 
ous with Eome at her greatest. The humble 
young Artisan of Palestine proclaims the king- 
dom of God, which, as we have been saying. He 
carries about with Him in His own person. There 
is nothing fanciful in our claim that, confined as 
yet to Himself, it is already greater than the 
realm of the Caesars. One Man against the 
world! And history gives us the record that 
there was more power in the one Man than in 
that world-kingdom, -^ more conquering, subdu- 
ing, moulding, reconstructing, organizing, domi- 
nating power. There is no denying the fact that 
He proved mightier. 

Nor are we even astonished that it should be 
so. Given a principle that can so master such 
a life as His, and what limit will you set to 
its conquests ? For it can command that vast 
and rarely seen reserve of power in man which, 
seriously enlisted and marshalled on behalf of 
what man can thoroughly believe in, honor, and 
trust, becomes simply invincible. It is a reserve 
power which ambition and fear, greed and hatred, 
are alike unable to summan. It will respond to 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 27 

no call but that of righteousness and truth and 
love. 

We are, however, continually miscalculating 
the strength of the combatants in the unceasing 
warfare. It is true, numbers are against us. But 
numbers were against the Greeks at Marathon. 
We forget that ^^the very stars in their courses 
fought against Sisera.'' We forget that a force is 
not measured by the actual present area in which 
we may see it operative, but rather by the in- 
tensity and unspent fulness which is the potency 
of things yet unseen and yet undreamed of. We 
see that in the triumph of Jesus Christ and the 
kingdom of God over the empire of the robbers 
of the ancient world. 

There is no question before Christendom to-day 
which can for a moment compare in importance 
with this : How may we get men at the present 
possessed of the power of Jesus, — the secret and 
method of Jesus, if you prefer to call it that ? 
How may we have among us here and now the 
potency of such conquest, and the working of 
such a force ? How may we get hold of the un- 
reached, untouched possibilities of character and 
achievement lying buried under the shallower 
occupations and interests of gain and pleasure ? 
How may we touch this humdrum mediocrity, 
and get heroes ? How may we clearly discern 
and practically apply the great principle of spir- 



28 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

itual values^ making one man worth ten thousand 
of such as his former self ? This is the key to 
the great problem^ for the most part so pettily 
handled by the present Church of Christ. 

The answer is in your Testament. There is 
none to teach us here but He who alone of men 
possessed in perfection the thing which we de- 
sire. What Jesus said, what He did, what He in- 
structed His chosen representatives to say and 
do, how they carried out their instructions, — it is 
all written in those Gospels and Epistles. 

Of which the root is, as we must say again, the 
kingdom within ; which cannot find a place till 
there be a resolute renunciation of old ideals, 
abandonment of old habits of thought, giving way 
to a different temper, a changed attitude, a new 
outlook — in a word, repentance. 

And how does the Master set to work to bring 
men to this ? 

He gathers disciples about Him. He bids them 
do as He does, walk in His footsteps, take His 
yoke upon them to be guided of Him, keep His 
commandments. He holds them close to Him ; in 
the intimacy of daily contact they catch His in- 
fluence, they begin to see things in His light. 
They experience in due time the bursting of the 
old barriers of timidity and unbelief and concern 
for self and regard for the world, and feel the 
inflowing of His very Life^ into their lives, in the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 29 

great Gift of Pentecost. Now they are men of 
Divine power, and victory attends them. 

This was His way with the Twelve. It is 
essentially still His way with all who would be 
His disciples. They must leave all and come to 
Him ; they must yield implicit obedience to His 
directions ; they must abide with Him, and open 
their whole souls to the illumination and quick- 
enning of His Spirit. In all the ages the men of 
lasting beneficent power have come to it in sub- 
stantially this way. There had to be a complete 
breaking with all that would hold back and fet- 
ter, a complete self-committal to the Highest the 
soul could see, an absolute concentration of in- 
most powers toward the realization of the great 
Purpose. 

The faithful declaration of these conditions has 
ever been honored of God. The ages of the 
Church's power, beginning with the Apostolic, 
have been those in which men took Jesus most 
seriously, and understood Him to mean what He 
said, — when He exhorted men to " seek the king- 
dom first," took Him to mean first ; when He 
warned them that " they could not serve God and 
Mammon," resolved they would have done with 
Mammon ; when He bade them " give up all and 
follow Him," brought everything and laid it at 
His feet, for His own disposal of it all. For 
when men have taken Jesus seriously, they have 



30 THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN US. 

been able to enter into His thoughts and plans 
not only concerning themselves, but concerning 
society, humanity, the world at large with all its 
complex interests ; they have been able to work 
with Him in those spheres, and to leave upon 
their generation and their age the mark of that 
which had transformed themselves. A character- 
less, compromise Christianity, no matter how 
numerically large, can never do that. The world 
needs what is first of all, — a kingdom of God 
ivithin us. 

How often has the Church forgotten this ! How 
often has she preferred a kingdom coming with 
observation ! It has always been, it is to-day, her 
fatal mistake. She began early to sacrifice the 
pure enthusiasm of apostolic days to greed for 
power and ambition for self-aggrandizement ; she 
received her reward in the triumphs of earthly 
empire, of outward pomp, by which the spirit is 
not satisfied and humanity not blest. She sowed 
to the flesh, and of the flesh reaped corruption. 
Bernard of Cluny, in the days of hierarchical 
glory, sighs and sings of a Heavenly Jerusalem 
the Golden, transferring the aspirations of a be- 
lieving soul from a kingdom here to a kingdom 
hereafter. Is it not a significant thing that so 
much of our popular Protestantism to-day does 
the same ? 



III. 

€{)e Hitngtiom of oBoti coming on <6art{). 



Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is 
in heaven. — Matt. vi. 10. 



III. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD COMING ON 
EAETH. 

TWO things there are to which the Chris- 
tian's faith bids him look forward, — the 
kingdom here, and the kingdom hereafter. And 
as we were saying, the fundamental mistake of 
the Church, committed so early and committed 
so often since, has always tended to hide the 
nearer of the two from view, and to hold up the 
remoter with unwearying persistence. This has 
been just as true of popular Protestantism as of 
Koman Catholicism. 

It is well, therefore, that the Lord's Prayer 
should bear its daily witness — albeit to dull ears 
and dull hearts — of just that which we are al- 
ways forgetting. The petitions taught us by the 
Master should make it clear that the future world, 
which we commonly call ^^ heaven," is not more 
important in God's scheme than the future of 
humanity in this world, that coming kingdom in 
which the Divine will shall be done on earth as 

3 



34 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

it is in heaven. Dr. Munger goes still further 
when he tells us, " The two are to be regarded as 
one. Eegenerated humanity and heaven are in- 
terchangeable terms; they are alike, and one 
simply passes on and up into the other." 

We have dwelt at sufficient length upon these 
two truths, that the kingdom begins in Christ, 
and that it is always primarily within. It is 
time now to assert that, being fundamentally of 
this nature, it must become outwardly manifest, 
it must be externally embodied ; in a word., it 
must come on earth. If there be any belief or 
sentiment, any emotion or experience, which per- 
manently remains within, and fails to find out- 
ward embodiment, and to transform its surround- 
ings — whatever else it may be, it is not that life 
of Grod in the soul which is the effect of the Gos- 
pel of Christ, the kingdom within. A '' kingdom 
within" which does not issue in a "kingdom 
coming on earth" is but, as Frederic Harrison 
characterized the abstractions of Herbert Spen- 
cer, "the ghost of religion." 

" Do we mean there must be a Church ? " 
While we mean much more, we do certainly 
mean that. Without it the Christian's Creed is 
incomplete. Because we believe in a God re- 
vealed to us in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we 
also, by necessity, ^ believe in a Holy Catholic 
Church, the Communion of Saints. From all 



COMING ON EARTH. 35 

who make the Church " an afterthought ; '' from 
all who regard her as a merely human institution, 
organized at the volition of men, therefore to be 
abandoned at will, and supplanted by another; 
from all who would reduce her to the level of a 
club, exercising their choice as to inclusion and 
exclusion by man-made tests and standards ; and 
from all who hold the Christian life to be an in- 
dividual concern, equally possible apart from her 
communion, — let us testify our everlasting dis- 
sent. How can we confess a Father, and yet 
deny His household ? How confess a Son, our 
Lord, and yet deny His brotherhood, the faithful 
company of His servants ? How confess a Holy 
Spirit, and yet deny His habitation in the temple 
of Christian communion ? The Church is essen- 
tial, in the sense that we cannot conceive of the 
Gospel finding lodgment in human society with- 
out the direct manifestation of its presence and 
power in a fellowship, sacred, united, continuous. 
Of the spiritual kingdom of God, the Church is 
the necessary embodiment. 

We shall doubtless be met with the objection 
that the Church of history is disfigured with 
wrongs, falsehoods, and hatreds which are the 
exact opposite of the righteousness and truth 
and love of the kingdom of God. Let us make 
no effort to conceal or to minimize these de- 
plorable faults. But let us also remember that 



36 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

if a man may be a holy man without being abso- 
lutely free from error and sin, so also may the 
Church be holy without being infallible. More- 
over, it must not be forgotten that the crimes 
committed in the name of the Church were 
mostly committed by those who had gained 
power within her and exercised an unprincipled 
" ring '' rule over her, silencing all protests and 
crushing out all opposition — in reality her ene- 
mies and not her representatives ; as, indeed, 
personal and political reasons have moved to 
probably the larger part of the cruelties and 
tyrannies practised against nonconformists in all 
ages. In the face of it all we will dare assert 
that in every age the reign of righteousness and 
truth and love has been very decidedly within 
the bounds of the Church, rather than without. 
When we say "the Church," we do not mean, of 
course, the hierarchy, or the clergy, or the accred- 
ited spokesmen, but the Society in its entirety ; 
out of whose obscurer membership has ofttimes 
come the prophet of a new age, with rebuke and 
promise. As, indeed, her worship and her ordi- 
nances, nay, her very presence, stood among men 
a continuous, living witness of the claims of 
righteousness, and truth, and love. 

That the witness has not been ineffectual; 
that, in other words, the kingdom of God em- 
bodied in the Church extended its sway to 



COMING ON EARTH. 37 

realms lying beyond its immediate boundary 
lines, exerting its influence upon human society 
as such, — this also we may read in history. 
Taking, for instance, the peoples of Europe, 
among whom the Church was established, can 
anything be plainer than the constant moral 
progress from Saint Paul's day to our own ? In 
civil government, in social customs, in business, 
everywhere outside the distinctively '' religious " 
life as well as within it, there has been a change 
for the better. To argue the point would be a 
waste of time. Difference of opinion as to the 
fact itself, there is none ; the disagreement arises 
only when we assign its cause. 

For there are still multitudes of people, some 
thoughtful and well informed, others taken cap- 
tive by a sounding word, who will explain all 
this as ^^an evolution." To whom we make 
reply that we have no objection to their calling 
it what they please, only so they do not leave us 
to the folly of believing that the earth makes 
itself better. The earth never makes itself better : 
you may set that down at once for a settled fact ! 

John Fiske, in that brilliant lecture of his (5n 
'^ Manifest Destiny," sketches the future of civili- 
zation in its progress from the horrors of warfare 
to the blessedness of universal peace. The devel- 
opment of industrialism and the inevitable pres- 
sure of competition are to terminate at length this 



38 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

cruel, monstrous, wasteful mode of settling inter- 
national disputes. The argument is admirable, 
but somehow one can hardly help feeling that the 
most important matter has been left untouched. 
^^Competition," "industrialism," these are not 
words so ill-favored as "war" and "aggrandize- 
ment ; " but, in this Dictionary of the age to come, 
will they not trace down to the same roots, of self 
and greed ? Unrestrained by ethical motives, the 
selfishness which curses individuals and societies 
will break out in open violence, to carry its point, 
if open violence serve its purpose best ; if by some 
other method its end will be more effectually 
reached, some other method it will employ. There 
is, therefore, in the end no sufficient force to deter 
from war save the infusion of the essential spirit 
of what we have called the Kingdom of God. 
Leave that out, circumstances may arise in which 
it may seem that a war of aggression promising 
great material advantage can be waged with im- 
punity, and what will prevent the wrong ? Woe 
to the people with whom no consideration higher 
than that of advantage shall intervene both to 
direct and to restrain ! 

But suppose that wars should cease by reason 
of the unprofitableness of blood-shedding. Per- 
haps it is not so brutal a sentiment as at first it 
appears when Von Moltke says, " Without war the 
world would stagnate, and Jose itself in materi- 



COMING ON EARTH. 39 

alism." God forbid that it should be necessary to 
continue the slaughter of our fellow-men in order 
to hold materialism in check ! What we know is 
that ^^industrialism'' (^^ business '' some prefer to 
call it) in time of peace perpetrates by " competi- 
tion " horrors as terrible as those of war. Charles 
Kingsley, in his " Cheap Clothes and Nasty/' pic- 
tured them in grim language ; and the worst of it 
was that the greater part of the tract consisted 
simply of figures and statements of fact quoted 
from the poor victims themselves. None too 
strongly did he say, " Folks are getting somewhat 
tired of the old rodomontade that a slave is free 
the moment he sets foot on British soil ! Stuff ! 
— are these tailors free ? Put any conceivable 
sense you will on the word, and then say — are 
they free ? " And again, " Sweet competition ! 
Heavenly maid ! - — Now a days hymned alike by 
penny-a-liners and philosophers as the ground of 
all society — the only real preserver of the earth ! 
. . . ^ These are thy works, thou parent of all 
good ! ' Man eating man, eaten by man, in every 
variety of degree and method ! " 

It will not do to say, that was in England, a. 
generation ago ! How many years is it since a 
Parlimentary commission investigated the sweat- 
ing system, and brought its undiminished abomi- 
nations officially to light ? — In England ? What, 
then, has Helen Campbell to say about our own 



40 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

laud ? And Jacob A. Eiis ? Of the mass of fic- 
tion dealing with these things we say not a word. 
Statistics and instantaneous photographs furnish 
us enough food for sober reflection. It does seem 
as if, when left to itself, the world out of every 
new discovery and invention forged the imple- 
ments of a new tyranny, to crush out the hopes 
of the weak, to set up some new bondage in the 
place of one just overthrown, and in short-sighted, 
greedy wickedness to destroy the greatest of all 
values, — humanity and human life. 

And when we cry out against such a state of 
things as Charles Kingsley and Helen Campbell 
have denounced, we are told, " It cannot be 
helped. Business is business." Precisely so; 
this is our very contention. It is only when you 
call in what is not business, what is of quite a 
different and higher order, that you get any help. 
If might makes right, and self-interest is su- 
preme, it is a waste of breath to appeal to men to 
refrain from oppression and extortion. "Busi- 
ness is business ! '^ 

Prof. Joseph Le Conte is a good enough evolu- 
tionist, we think, to satisfy any reasonable re- 
quirement. It might be well for all those who, 
speaking much of " Evolution," really seem to 
mean thereby that the world is indebted to itself 
for its improvement, to read what he has to say 
of the indispensableness of the Christ in the pro- 



COMING ON EARTH. 41 

cess of the development of the race.^ " The 
Christ," he writes, " must reveal the right way of 
life before we can follow, and transform our char- 
acters thereby. . . . This Divine ideal can never 
again be lost, because it is itself the agent of its 
own realization.'' 

Saint John, in his Apocalyptic vision, " saw the 
holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of 
heaven from God." This has not yet ceased to 
be a fitting figure of the earth's redemption and 
the true progress of humanity, — a figure not pri- 
marily, as we take it, of the blessed life after 
death, but of the kingdom of God coming on 
earth. The secret of its presence, which at the 
same time is the pledge of its final triumph, is 
that essentially it is come down out of heaven 
from God. 

True, its progress must be slow. It is a vast 
mass which is to be lifted and held up. The 
amount of change to be wrought is tremendous, 
and the opposing factors are great and strong. 
Again and again it has seemed as if the kingdom 
had come with observation, — as if one might say 
of it, " Lo, here ! " or, " There ! " — and men have 
thought that now at length, by one great bound, 
the reign of righteousness and truth and love on 
earth had been fully ushered in. Exceptional 

^ Andover Review, July, 1891. "The Relation of the 
Church to Modern Scientific Thought." 



42 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 

circumstances, not to be maintained for any 
length of time, have made experiments possible 
whose brief success has been less instructive than 
their ultimate failure. Savonarola's Florence 
and Calvin's Geneva do not endure. 

In all this there is no cause for discourage- 
ment. John Henry Newman, in one of his ex- 
quisite little hymns, utters the prayer which we 
all have need to pray, — 

" Lord ! who Thy thousand years dost wait 
To work the thousandth part 
Of Thy vast plan, for us create 
With zeal a patient heart/' 

Meanwhile can we not see how, in God's vast 
plan, the kingdom is to take outward possession 
of this poor sin-burdened earth? Through the 
succession of God-inspired men full of holy en- 
thusiasm the impulse is imparted to well-mean- 
ing but shorter-sighted bodies of men, and so 
the movement is communicated, still from God, 
through His prophets to the people. And as of 
old time, though with the freedom which belongs 
to the Spirit, the prophets of the preparation 
came from His chosen Israel, so still to-day, with 
the same freedom, the prophets of the coming 
kingdom arise (albeit not necessarily from the 
priestly lines or the straitest sect) within the 
borders of His Church. At the present hour it is 
precisely one of the most pheering of all signs 



COMING ON EARTH. 43 

that in the Church at large more heed is paid 
to Saint Paul's great exhortation, "Quench not 
the Spirit ; despise not prophesyings ; prove all 
things ; hold fast that which is good.'' A freer 
and a purer Church, nursing mother of great wit- 
nesses and of leaders filled with holy enthusiasm, 
furnishing moreover not only leaders, but increas- 
ingly also large and earnest bodies of followers 
in the great campaign, — next to our faith in the 
Triune God of our redemption is our faith in 
her, the pillar and ground of the truth ! 

** I love Thy kingdom, Lord, 
The house of Thine abode. 
The Church our blest Eedeemer sav'd 
With His own precious blood ! 

** Sure as Thy truth shall last, 
To Zion shall be given 
The brightest glories earth can yield. 
And brighter bliss of heaven." 



IV. 
€l)e canitierjBfai Jiingtiom of «iE>atJ. 



" Thou didst put all things in subjection under his feet." 
For in that He subjected all things unto Him, He left noth- 
ing that is not subject unto Him. But now we see not yet 
all things subject unto Him. — Heb. ii. 8. 



IV. 

THE UNIVEESAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

THEEE is a peculiar turn of thought in this 
writer's use of the Psalm quotation: re- 
ferring primarily to man, as the crown of crea- 
tion, it is here applied to Jesus, in a manner at 
first sight diflB.cult to understand. A key to it, 
perhaps, is in the fact that the whole significance 
of Jesus, when spoken of in connection with the 
world-order, is in His perfect humanity. Surely 
if the ideal man, the man as his Creator designs 
him, is " crowned with glory and honor,'' is " set 
over the works of His hands," and may be said to 
have "all things put in subjection under his feet " 
— then Jesus ; for Jesus is what man is designed 
and created to be. 

Those who have followed us in the observa- 
tions thus far made respecting the principles of 
the kingdom of God, may reasonably ask, "Do you 
honestly expect that the theory you have set 
forth will ever find complete practical embodi- 
ment ? What you have said about the Divine 
will and government, and the true laws of human 



48 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

welfare and progress, is all well enough : but do 
you really think that the earth will ever see such 
a state of things as you depict ? Do you sin- 
cerely look for a time when the domain of the 
Christian Gospel and of Christian Society will be 
more than provincial, — will become what may 
fairly be called Universal ? " 

The question is a fair one, and the text we 
think covers it. fairly on both sides. "He left 
nothing that is not subject unto Him. But now 
we see not yet all things subject unto Him.^^ We 
are quite ready to give the categorical answer, 
Yes, We do look for the kingdom of God to be 
yet, in due time, universal. 

We admit that we see not yet all things subject 
unto Him, — vast areas of humanity still unsub- 
dued, still unreached, unclaimed. 

We look at the actual present population of the 
globe, and see the millions on millions of our race 
who are not yet so much as touched by the first 
ray of the Gospel. Several years ago an eminent 
English churchman, Canon Taylor, stirred the 
religious public by an article on "The Great 
Missionary Failure." The startling picture of the 
non-Christian populations of Asia and Africa in- 
creasing annually at the rate of more than eleven 
millions, with an annual increase of native Chris- 
tians of only some sixty thousand ; to say noth- 
ing of his description of the aggressiveness and 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 49 

strength of Mohammedanism, — we do not regret 
his forcing them upon the Christian world, for it 
is our business to deal with facts and to take all 
the facts into account. We would not forget, 
moreover, the vices and wrongs of which Euro- 
peans and Americans on missionary soil are so 
often guilty ; the intemperance, immorality, greed, 
and fraud, exhibited by those who have come 
from Christian lands and are taken as represen- 
tatives of the Christian religion. Rum in Africa, 
opium in Asia, avarice in both, these are worse 
things for the missionary to contend against than 
superstition, ignorance, and unbelief ; bad enough 
in themselves, but in this connection a hundred- 
fold worse because they are the shame of his 
people. 

Turn from lands we call " heathen " to those 
we call '* Christian." What is the ethical and 
spiritual condition of the nations of Europe, for 
example ? Great Britain, Germany, France, 
Russia, — call the roll down to the smallest ; is 
the kingdom of God conspicuously dominant 
in any of them ? See their huge standing armies, 
the combustible material for a conflagration of war 
more terrible in its magnitude than perhaps any 
in history. Mark their statesmanship, and note 
the principles which appear to govern their deal- 
ings with one another. Look into their inner 
life ; observe the different classes of society 

4 



50 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

among them ; are righteousness and truth and 
love enthroned there ? Go through their great 
cities ; see the luxury on the one hand, the pau- 
perism on the other : let one who knows tell you 
of the corruption existing unrebuked, unpunished, 
the intrenched immorality which is a constant 
threat to the law-abiding people of the commu- 
nity. And how much better is our own nation, 
which is pleased to regard itself as pre-eminently 
in the favor of the Almighty and quite indispens- 
able to His plans ? America, with the haste of 
its people to get rich, and the bitterness of large 
classes who find themselves outstripped in the 
race ; with a '' sweating " system of our own ; 
with private wars waged between the hired 
soldiery of great corporations and their dissatis- 
fied employees ; with the shame of our treatment 
of the Indian and other inferior races, when here 
and there they seem to stand in the white man's 
way; with the saloon, the gambling room, the 
brothel, flourishing and multiplying, and with the 
ofiicial complicity with vice ; with seventy-five 
per cent, of our young men never entering the 
church door ; with the domination of the dan- 
gerous classes in our city politics the land over, 
and the dictation of terms and candidates by the 
organized corruption of the community ; with the 
sale, virtually, of positions of high honor and trust 
in our civil government,^ — altogether there are 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 51 

many things in our national life "not yet subject 
unto Him." 

Nor, where we look for light, can we candidly 
say that everything is bright and encouraging. 
Consider the condition of the Christian Church in 
her most advanced and " evangelical " branches : 
how little genuine faith, how much petty timid- 
ity, trimming and time-serving ; what gingerly 
handling of the great commandments of Christ ; 
loud professions joined with self -pampering and 
inability to endure hardness ; zeal for orthodoxy 
and apathy toward the real triumph of our Lord ! 
Is it an ugly statement ? Judge for yourselves if 
it does not exhibit fairly one side of the situation ! 

No, we do not yet see all things subject unto 
Him. 

Nevertheless they yet shall be. We accept it 
as a principle of faith. We believe it upon 
Christ's own word, and upon that of His servants 
who spake moved by His Spirit. We accept it as 
a conclusion of reason ; for we cannot conceive of 
the ultimate triumph of evil over good, of false- 
hood over truth. We accept it as the logical 
conclusion of what we ourselves have seen and 
learned of the progress of the Kingdom down to 
the present. 

For, as we have already said, that the world 
nevertheless is better, and is growing better, ad- 
mits of no serious denial. Doubtless one reason 



52 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

why we may draw up such a catalogue of *^ things 
not yet subject unto Christ'' is that we are now 
in possession of more searching tests, of higher 
standards. The very conceptions and ideas that 
now gain acknowledgment, and so enter by edu- 
cation into the moral veins of the rising genera- 
tion, are better and higher conceptions and ideas 
than men used to have. When the common 
thought embraces the recognition of righteous- 
ness and truth and love, — and this it is doing in 
an ever-increasing measure, — it is but the ac- 
knowledgment, conscious or unconscious, that it 
is right that all things should be made subject 
unto Him. The acknowledgment must thence- 
forth draw after it the realization of such an 
order of things, by the compulsion of conscience 
and common-sense. The fact must, however tar- 
dily, follow the idea. 

And it is well for us to remember that God is 
not confined to ways and methods now employed, 
nor to a rate of progress such as His kingdom 
now exhibits. The centuries seemed to lie dor- 
mant till at the proper hour, in the fulness of 
time, the fearful abuses of the mediaeval Church 
were assailed and overthrown. And again, save 
for internal dissensions, the Church seemed to 
have forgotten to work and fight till the century 
of foreign missions was ushered in. Church his- 
tory, and all history, has been full of surprises. 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 53 

Long preparing in secret, the new order has again 
and again burst forth upon an astonished world. 
There is nothing magical, nothing arbitrary, in 
it; the factors were all there, and if one had 
seen and known thero, he could have foretold 
the inevitable result. 

So, if we would look again at the great mis- 
sionary field of the world, and bring together 
what there is of past and present achieve- 
ment, we should find it of actually larger dimen- 
sions than the numerical exhibit given us by 
Canon Taylor. The figures may be correct 
enough, and the task before the Church is 
doubtless of gigantic magnitude ; and yet the 
figures do not tell the whole story, nor does 
magnitude mean hopelessness. It is not so 
very long since the annual increase of native 
Christians was by no means sixty thousand. 
There is no unalterable edict that it shall not 
exceed that number, or that proportion toward 
the annual increase in the pagan populations. 
We cannot forget Japan ; and the actual present 
gain in converts may be small, while yet the ad- 
vance of the forces of the kingdom of God toward 
the conquest of the dark places of the earth may 
be rapid and victorious, — only that the point has 
not been reached where all that has been gained 
shall fully appear. AVho that is at all familiar 
with the work of the foreign missionary will need 



54 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

to be told that it often involves years of digging 
and laying foundations ere the first stone of the 
visible structure can be laid ? But from that 
very fact the foreign missionary sees in most 
lands, as the result of his efforts, not only indi- 
vidual lives won for his Lord, and churches or- 
ganized, but the adoption of better ideas in gov- 
ernment, in social life, in business ; he sees the 
outward form, and in a degree the inner spirit, of 
pagan society considerably affected, sometimes 
materially changed. If Canon Taylor can justly 
charge — and probably in the case of some he 
can — that " European missionaries fail because 
they attempt to make Asiatics or Africans into 
middle-class English Philistines," it would still 
not follow that Christianity will not be ultimately 
triumphant among all the peoples of the earth, in 
a form adapted to the national and racial peculi- 
arities of each. Surely there is every reason to 
believe that so fundamental a principle will ob- 
tain general recognition sooner or later, and then 
we may expect the missionary to succeed as, in 
some parts, he does not now. 

After all, the final question regarding the 
kingdom among heathen peoples comes to this : 
Is not the very fact that what the Christian mis- 
sionary has to bring them is better in itself, and 
better in its accompanying effects, than what they 
now possess, — is not this itself the pledge that 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 55 

the most open-minded, the wisest, and the best 
among them will accept it ? If any people have 
once fairly had the Christ brought to their view, 
is not their destiny thereafter fixed; are they 
not bound thenceforth either to accept or to 
reject Him ; and will not the process begun 
go on to its completion ? Kemember the say- 
ing of Le Conte, the evolutionist, ^^This Di- 
vine Ideal can never again be lost, because 
it is itself the agent of its own realization." 
It may be a thing difficult to conceive that the 
teeming millions of Asia and Africa are yet to 
be Christianized, at least as thoroughly as the 
populations of Europe and America are now ; 
but to conceive of their being of the same race, 
the same humanity, with ourselves, and learning 
of the Christ, as they are fated to learn more 
and more in this day of ever-extending inter- 
course, without being profoundly affected, even 
transformed, — to conceive that, we say, would 
far more stagger our powers of imagination. No 
one who has read history to any purpose will se- 
riously question what the outcome must be. The 
rejection of the Christ by some will no more hin- 
der His acceptance by others, and His virtual 
enthronement ultimately over all, than the like 
rejection, accompanied by brutal and fiendish 
persecutions, did in Jerusalem or in Eome. And 
whatever new garb of philosophic doctrine, of 



56 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

polity, or of cultus, Christianity may assume 
among those nations yet to be converted, it will 
be the reign of our common Lord Jesus Christ, 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. 

Look once more also at the Christian world, 
so-called. There, we have already said in no 
ambiguous way, we do not yet see all things sub- 
ject unto Him. May we also see any indications 
of their coming subjection ? May we see any 
signs of the progress of the kingdom in Christen- 
dom itself ? What hopes have we, on what are 
they centred ? 

We have spoken of the higher conceptions and 
the loftier standards now held up before us as an 
evidence of progress, even while they may serve 
to discourage us in the judgments they compel 
us to pronounce upon our times. If we were asked 
to state in what particulars we have reached a 
higher conception of Christianity, we should an- 
swer : In two. In the first place, we are increas- 
ingly coming to regard Christianity as more than 
a religion, — a life. Religion addresses man on 
one side of his nature ; the Gospel addresses itself 
to the ivhole maUj and claims him entirely. With 
that change of view ensues, not a secularization of 
things heretofore held sacred, but a sanctification 
of things heretofore held common, — with possibly 
less emphasis upon things peculiarly "sacred." 
In the second place, Christianity is no longer left 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 57 

to begin and end in the individual's rescue from 
perdition, but is held to be equally a social mat- 
ter, — indeed, not itself until it does become a 
social matter, — so that fellowship, brotherliness, 
co-operation for all worthy ends, from lowliest to 
highest, in a word, love, is taken to be its crown- 
ing manifestation. 

It is possible, of course, to press these views 
too far, — not, indeed that they could be too 
strongly stated, but that they might be urged to 
the exclusion of other truths no less indispensa- 
ble. But holding them in their proper relation, 
aifd, if you will, with utmost intensity, they are 
a substantial gain to our own spiritual posses- 
sions, and a mighty help to the coming of the 
kingdom of God. 

For it is precisely along these two lines of 
thought that men generally are to-day open to ap- 
peal. Take the popular addresses of Professor 
Drummond, for example, and observe how he 
presses home again and again these views of 
Christianity and of the Christian life, and how his 
booklets are seized with avidity by the public, like 
bread by the starving. And have not people been 
starving, lo ! these many years ? — starving for 
the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its simplicity and 
yet comprehensiveness. Candidly, has the preach- 
ing of the Christian ministry as a whole supplied 
what humanity has most needed ? 



58 THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 

Indeed we may note the beginnings of a de- 
cided change in the pulpit of to-day. The mes- 
sage is becoming direct, living, practical, in the 
best sense of those hackneyed adjectives. Evan- 
gelistic addresses, so long marked as a whole by 
unreality and remoteness, which was poorly cov- 
ered by lurid rhetoric and heated emotion, — 
evangelistic addresses are partaking of the new 
spirit, and are in consequence taking hold by 
their true ethical and spiritual power of the 
busy populations of our great cities. Other 
signs of the change are beginning to appear 
on every hand. 

A great German theologian, Eothe, carries out 
his philosophy to the conclusion that ultimately 
the Christian State will supplant the Christian 
Church. His thought was that while the Church 
as commonly conceived is but partial, the Chris- 
tian State would be universal : whereas in the 
former some worship, in the latter all would both 
live and worship to the glory of God and in the 
name of Christ. Industry, statesmanship, art, 
literature, science, — all would be dedicated to 
God, all would be at the service of humanity. 

The dream is a splendid one ; whether in 
such a form it shall ever come to pass need not 
concern us ; neither need we be concerned re- 
garding those other questions of speculative in- 
terest which even our Lord encountered when 



THE UNIVERSAL KINGDOM OF GOD. 59 

one asked Him, " Lord, are they few that be 
saved ? " and he made reply, " Strive to enter in 
by the narrow door." Enough for us to know 
that His kingdom cannot suffer defeat or check ; 
that all its triumphs mean increase of blessing to 
men, because its triumphs are the triumphs of 
righteousness and truth and love ; that to us is 
given the unspeakable privilege of fighting under 
Him and laboring with Him whom God hath 
highly exalted, and given the Name which is 
above every name ; " that in the Name of Jesus 
every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and 
things on earth, and things under the earth; 
and that every tongue should confess that Jesus 
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." 



<areat ^^op to 31111 ^eo}iIe< 



Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which 
shall be to all the people. — Luke ii. 10. 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

JOY." What joy ? If it be only such as 
this world often brings, heralded with 
much flourish, keenly anticipated — the longer 
we live, the less shall we be thrilled by the an- 
nouncement. For the greater part of these joys 
are very meagre joys, long in coming, quickly 
gone. Is there anything, then, in what this 
angel says ? — anything for men and women to 
whom disappointment and sorrow have often 
come ; who have perhaps begun to think that the 
momentary lull of quiet but forebodes another 
storm ? — or for those whose very abundance of 
prosperity has given them a surfeit of pleasures, 
and who have grown sceptical of the existence 
of any satisfying and enduring joy ? Oh, Angel 
of Bethlehem, to how many incredulous ears and 
weary hearts is thy message repeated this day ! 

" Great joy ? " How often are the children of 
men deceived in their expectations of a great joy. 
The acquisition of what is strangely called a 
" fortune," meaning large possessions, does expe- 
rience prove that a great joy ? Even if it were 



64 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

not accompanied, as it always is, by added cares 
and new anxieties, would it be a thing in which 
the heart of man could for long rest and be satis- 
fied ? Has it been, with those who have made 
the trial ? Let us not be cynical in our judg- 
ment. Wealth to some has brought much relief, 
comfort, opportunity for richer and nobler life, 
as it always ought to do ; but has it been a great 
joy? — that sort of joy with which one may rise 
in the morning, look it calmly in the face, and 
say of it, " It is enough ; I am content '^ ? — that 
sort of joy which can circumfuse all things and 
all happenings with a golden atmosphere, and 
leave no room in us for secret misgiving and 
dread of possible calamity and failure ? The 
coming of a fortune to you might mean the abil- 
ity to do for family and friends the things which 
you have so often wished for them, to cheer and 
help, possibly give new lease of life to some dear 
one ; but even so, would it be, could it be, the 
great good for which your soul is hungering ? 

How is it with the attainment of fame ? Is 
that the great joy of human life ? Grant that it 
were pure and honestly gotten fame, which so 
much of the world's fame is not ; grant that 
your fellow-men were judges of it, which they 
rarely are ; grant that, genuine and rightly ap- 
preciated, it would remain undimmed and unfor- 
gotten for even one brief year, which it will not ; 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 65 

4 

grant that when attained in one form or degree 
it did not create, as it almost always does, an 
unnatural thirst for ever more and more, ending 
how often in morbid egotism, in greediness for 
praise and adulation, asking for ceaseless incense 
to the idol, self, — I say, grant that fame were 
genuine, and appreciated, and kept fresh in this 
hurrying world, and left, you still unspoiled (an 
accumulation of improbabilities), would it be, 
even so, the great joy to you ? I believe those 
who have tried would honestly say, and not hesi- 
tate a moment to say, " It would not. It could 
not.'' 

But there are other gifts which are not like 
these, only for the few ; better precisely because 
they tire more common. There is — homely 
thing to speak of here, but so much lamented 
when lost — there is health. And that is a joy. 
Let us not undervalue it. Let us remember that 
God bestowed His special thought and care on 
the fashioning of these bodies, on the harmony 
of their functions and powers, so that when 
cared for as befits His crowning handiwork, they 
should praise Him in health, the temples of His 
Spirit. Strange it is, therefore, but we know 
that it is true, that some of the healthiest people 
in the world are not happy. They go when and 
where others dare not, their bodies do them ser- 
vice as those of their less fortunate fellows can- 

5 



66 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

not; they have vigor, superabounding animal 
spirits, but no steady radiant joy. You may say 
they are the exceptions. Perhaps not ! But 
grant it. Suppose men have that perfection of 
physical equipoise which means bodily comforta- 
bleness, and which is, so far as it goes, just what 
God wishes us to have, does it go far enough to 
be in itself ^^ great joy"? Great joy for a hu- 
man being, higher than mere animal organism 
made for digestion, exercise, and sound sleep ? 
Do there not come into such lives of thoughtless, 
good-natured health glimpses of deeper things 
which disturb the evenness of their satisfaction ? 
Thank God ! yes. How well-fed comfortable- 
ness will avoid where it can the vision of misery 
and hunger and disease, — vision never cheerful, 
not pleasing to God Himself, but exhibiting what 
comes of error, wrong, and sin, and therefore 
essentially kin to well-fed comfortableness as to 
shivering poverty. " Thou art the man," spoken 
to David in his strength and luxury, swept his 
joys away in an instant. Does not the selfish 
indifference to others which so often marks those 
who carefully guard their comfort, shrink from 
the sight of pain because it fears that at that 
sight its hideous self will be unmasked ? No ; 
let us not be deceived. Health let us seek, let 
us guard (but not at too great cost to others !), let 
us thank God for ; but let us not say, as we have 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 67 

often heard men say, '^ So long as I have my 
health and sufficient income, I want nothing 
more ! ^^ 

There are joys, however, which may be still 
more truly joys, — joys of friendship and of 
closer affection, in which we begin to feel how 
far above these lower things our true life rises; 
and among such, suggested especially by this 
gladdest of birthdays, is one which may indeed 
be called a great joy. It is the joy that came to 
Zacharias and Elizabeth; it is the joy that 
comes over and over again when a little child 
claims a place among us and makes home twice 
home by his blessed advent ; when a little life is 
begun in the midst of us, wonder and mystery 
ever fresh, promise and possibility of what glo- 
rious things to come ! The joy which parents 
have in watching over, guiding, and training 
their child, even though it cost them toil and 
suffering, is one of life's greatest joys. But oh, 
the pangs of disappointment, the agonies of sor- 
row, when all that love seems wasted ; when the 
child is worse than dead, gone to uselessness, to 
shame and moral ruin, gone beyond their recall ! 
Where then is the joy? 

Enough. If there is such a thing as a great 
joy in which we may infallibly trust, let us know 
it, and understand clearly what it is and how we 
may have part in it. Is there, again we ask, such 



68 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

a thing as a joy that will not fail us when we 
want it most ; that will bear transportation from 
the regions of youth to those of old age, health to 
infirmity, wealth to want, and through all the 
sundry chances and changes of this mortal life, 
will remain steadfast and sure ? 

The Angel of Bethlehem tells us there is. 
Again on Christmas-Day his message comes to us, 
'' good tidings of great joy which shall be to all 
the people/' Good tidings, indeed, if the word 
be not merely a rhetorical figure, but the literal 
truth: ^^ great joy to all people.'^ This is what 
we need ; this is what a heaven-sent gift should 
be — to all people ! No matter who they may 
be, high or lowly, — and, indeed, to the lowly came 
the message first of all, — no matter what sort of 
house they live in, or what clothes they wear, or 
whether they have of this world's goods laid by 
in store ; no matter whether cultivated or plain, 
learned or ignorant; no matter what may have 
happened to them this twelve-month, or what may 
be staring them in the face this very day ; whether 
they be young or old, well or ill, beloved in this 
world or friendless, — a joy to fit them all ! 

That is too much to promise ? Not if there be 
a Gospel of God at all. If it reach not so far as 
this, then we have no further business here. 
Vacate the pulpit, empty the pews, close the 
church; and when you reach home take your 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 69 

Bible from its place of honor and of readiest use 
and put it away upon the shelf beside the Arabian 
Nights. This is a real world ; and if the thing 
break down in actual life, it were both foolish and 
wicked to maintain the show of still believing it ! 
No ; it is not too much for God to promise, or 
for us to expect. Philip still bids us "come 
and see." Make trial of it. Put it to the test. 
Let the appeal be, not to Scripture text, but to 
the witness of experience, to actual life. And 
there — shall we fear to claim it ? — the announce- 
ment has been fully sustained. Through the 
Child born in that radiant night, there has come 
a new element into the struggle and toil of our 
human life ; a new power to sustain us, a healing 
virtue to take the sting out of our failures and 
pains, a glory to fill common things with new 
splendors, a vital energy to impart to our very 
enjoyments a new life and zest and reality. The 
world-old cry, — 

" 'T is life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
Oh, life, not death, for which we pant ; 
More life, and fuller, that I want," — 

has its answer in Him who was proclaimed on 
Christmas night as the Great Joy of all people, and 
who came that they might have life, and might 
have it more abundantly. 

For He brought us first of all a truer manhood. 
If birthdays are worth celebrating in proportion 



70 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

as the lives they usher in are great and worthy, 
and their effects still present with us ; is not 
Jesus' supremely the birthday for the whole 
world's commemoration ? He who, by what He 
Himself was, has given to the very word Man a 
new definition, filling it with new content of mean- 
ing, exhibiting its yet undreamed-of capacities, 
" the Man Christ Jesus," shall we not celebrate 
Him, shall we not rejoice in Him ? He has en- 
riched the whole race, and every human being 
henceforth born into the world owes Him a debt. 
And this we set down as the first element of 
the Great Joy to All People. For this is indeed 
fundamental. He gives us to know ourselves. 
He gives us the light of true life. What can all 
else avail us, us who are men, if we be not living 
the true life of men ? — since, if that prime essen- 
tial be wanting, all else can but divert for a time, 
only to bring us back to the great failure, the 
great emptiness, the defeat of life ! At some 
time destined to arrive and not to be put off for- 
ever, at some time if there be any Purpose or 
Design in creation at all, we must come to terms 
with that fundamental necessity of being what we 
were made to be. In that day, not to be what we 
were made to be, can have but one logical conse- 
quence : it is pictured as " outer darkness " and 
"weeping and gnashing of teeth." Is it not clear 
as the sun in the heavens- that if we lose man- 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 71 

hood we lose all ? What shall it profit a man if 
he gain the whole world and lose his own life ! ^ 
The day will come when every pleasure and every 
joy falsely so-called which helped to bring on that 
great bankruptcy, shall be remembered with bit- 
terness unutterable ; yea, every otherwise legiti- 
mate joy, even, that was used to silence the 
deeper cravings of the spirit, shall also appear 
but loss. 

Hail, then, to Him who points us the way, and 
lends us His hand, and inspires us to the true 
life for which we are created ! Hail to Him who 
brings to the world the light and power of true 
manhood ! His very warnings shall make us re- 
joice, His very rebukes shall make us glad, if all 
the while we can feel that these are pledges to 
us that we are on the right way, and have noth- 
ing to fear being with Him, and shall be par- 
takers of His own crown of manhood at the last ! 

Yes, warnings and rebukes there must be. Our 
idea, the world's idea, is not high enough ; to 
come up only to that is to fall below His. The 
Master takes us in hand in order that he may 
bring us up to His idea. His idea of a true man 
was in some essential respects different from that 
of Jews and Greeks and Eomans, so that the very 
evidences of the strength of His manhood seemed 
to them marks of weakness. He was derided ; 
1 See Revised Testament. 



72 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

but He triumphed. The " weakness " which from 
Him passed over into His followers, who became 
men after His pattern, proved to be of the quality 
that makes soldiers, heroes, and martyrs. Still 
the world is not quite ready to approve of His 
pattern ; still men are not ready to give up and be 
losers, as they think, and so they become the real 
losers in the end. For he that has heartily ac- 
cepted the idea of Jesus, he that will lead a true 
life in Jesus' light, has the secret of a deeper and 
more real happiness than the world ; for out of 
forbearance, self-denial, sacrifice, he extracts a 
finer joy. The supreme human satisfaction is 
his of growing in stature, — of making real gain 
by every day that he walks with his Master. 
The end he cannot foresee; he knows not yet 
what he shall be ; but he knows he shall be like 
Him ! Is not that, stripped of all rhetorical un- 
realities, soberly viewed, and plainly stated, — is 
not that Great Joy ? To be sure, there is still 
some remnant of that conflicting principle in his 
breast ; ofttimes he turns his gaze from the 
great Star of his highest and his honest purpose 
to fix it upon some will-o'-the-wisp of worldly 
allurement, and misses his way, sinking into 
bogs ; then he is miserable as the world is mis- 
erable, with show of gayety perhaps, as the 
world wears its mask of gayety ; the honest 
disciple cannot be content to remain there, and 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 73 

will not, nor will his Master leave him there 
to perish ; he will come back again, and more 
soberly, more calmly, but with deeper because 
wholesome satisfaction, he will again walk in 
the light of his Great Joy. 

But Jesus brings us what is the ground of that 
true manhood, — the Fatherhood of God. He 
came to declare the Father. He said plainly 
that the love which His disciples saw shin- 
ing forth from Him was the love of the Father. 
He taught them that what He exhibited in 
His treatment of men and His attitude toward 
them of affection, of sympathy, of tenderness, of 
self-offering for help and deliverance, of indigna- 
tion against falsehood, of wrath against wicked- 
ness, making up the spiritual " glory " beheld by 
His apostles, — what He exhibited thus in the 
narrow confines of brief, circumscribed earth-life, 
all this is Godhead, this is the Father. What- 
ever infinitely more than this He may be, — 
which poor finite human minds cannot take in, 
— other than this He is not ; He is nothing 
which would contradict or destroy this or make 
it of none effect. Saint John says plainly God 
is Love. A preacher of to-day has employed the 
phrase which incorporates the spirit of Saint 
John's Gospel, ^^The Christ-likeness of God.'' 

Consider now how great a Joy is this revela- 
tion. It drives to the moles and bats forever 



74 GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 

those idol-notions of Deity which have so long 
darkened the skies for us. No more philosophi- 
cal abstractions which chill and terrify, but a 
living, feeling, loving, helping Father ! No 
more devices of men, blind leading blind, 
making Him altogether like themselves in nar- 
row jealousy, and petty insistence upon the 
claims of royal dignity and exaction of penal- 
ties, but a Father loving all men as .His children, 
honored in their filial trustfulness, chastising as 
Love chastises with the relentlessness only of 
love for men, and hate of no man. 

To know that the Supreme Power of the uni- 
verse is essentially such, that we live under such 
a rule, and are amenable to such a Judge, — yea, 
rather, are welcomed to call on such a Defender, 
whose tenderness toward us passes the tender- 
ness of earthly parents toward their children, — 
does it not make life a different thing? Is it 
not the Great Joy for which we have been wait- 
ing and hungering, even while we knew not 
clearly what we lacked? 

Giving ourselves in sincerity and with full pur- 
pose of heart to Him as we see Him and may 
touch Him in our blessed Saviour ; heeding His 
call to become His obedient children, and leaving 
ourselves to the guidance of His well-beloved 
Son, our Elder Brother ; becoming more and 
more like Him in our thoughts and our estimates 



GREAT JOY TO ALL PEOPLE. 75 

of all things, in our purposes and affections, — 
can it be otherwise than that the troubles, ad- 
versities, hindrances, humiliations, disappoint- 
ments, of life shall all be transmuted into means 
of blessing to us, and sooner or later become oc- 
casions of joy ? Saint Paul spoke as one that 
knew — of tribulation he had surely had his 
share — when he said, " And to them that love 
God all things work together for good;" and 
again, " In all these things we are more than 
conquerors through Him that loved us. For I 
am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor things present, 
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor 
depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to 
separate us from the love of God, which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord." Could triumph be com- 
pleter ? Has a higher or more exultant joy ever 
recorded itself in human words ? Yet it is per- 
fectly adapted to be, it is essentially, the Great 
Joy to All People. 

'' Once again, blessed time, 

Thankful hearts embrace thee ; 
If we lost thy festal chime, 

What could e'er replace thee 1 
Change will darken many a day, 

Many a bond dissever ; 
Many a joy shall pass away, 

But the Great Joy never ! " 



VI. 
€|)c i^uman Hife 2Ditoine. 



And the Word became flesh and dwelt amon^ us. — 
John i. 14. 

For verily not of angels doth He take hold, but He 
taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. — Heb. ii. 16. 



VI. 

THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

" TI> EC AME flesh " — " dwelt among us " — we 
-L-^ are in continual danger of practically for- 
getting that. Could the apostle have put it in 
a stronger way ? '' Flesh ! " — our own very hu- 
manity. '^ Among us!" — in the very midst of 
common, every-day people, — fishermen, mechan- 
ics, trades-folk — and not up somewhere in the 
clouds, or in some remote Elysian clime, from 
our toils and struggles and dull drudgeries far 
removed. 

In the quaint language of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews it is the same thought. '' Not of angels 
doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the 
seed of Abraham." That is to say, He does not 
assume the angelic condition, and dwell among 
cherubim and seraphim; He assumes the condi- 
tion simply of human kind. In both Scriptures 
there is an endeavor to bring the plain fact right 
home to our dull understandings, — the plain fact 
that this perfectly pure, spotless, exalted, and 
noble life of Jesus was a human life, lived in 



80 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

human society, under human conditions ; with the 
same earthly drawbacks, limitations, and beset- 
ments that we ourselves so often feel and deplore. 

For various reasons it becomes necessary in 
our day to reassert the dignity of human life. 
The microscopic scrutiny of motives and char- 
acter practised in some of our modern literature 
has done not a little to lower popular estimates 
of human worth. The weaknesses of the good, 
the littlenesses of the great, the meannesses of 
the benevolent, the worldly shrewdness and the 
insincerities of the religious, — these are laid 
bare by the skilful touch of clever writers whose 
chief ambition it seems to be to dispel our illu- 
sions and make us quit our idols. It is all well 
enough, if only we are not brought gradually to 
sneer at all ideals. We cannot help thinking it 
would be better to believe our common humanity 
nobler than it is, than to come to doubt whether 
humanity could be noble at all ! 

Then there is that great power, modern Sci- 
ence. So many facts relating to man's intellec- 
tual and moral life are now partly accounted for 
by physical causes, that there is an observable 
tendency among men toward regarding life as a 
matter of heredity, diet, hygiene, and outward 
environment. We thank God for Science: for 
the discovery of wonder upon wonder in the 
physical part of us ; for all^ we may learn where- 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 81 

by the body shall more efficiently serve the soul. 
But let us not be blind to the peril that comes 
with this increased knowledge, when cultivated 
in a one-sided manner. Instead of lifting up the 
life, becoming a new impulse to ennoble it, such 
a pursuit of Science has often served rather to 
degrade, to deaden the sense of the spiritual. 
What a dreary wisdom is this which loves to 
thrust upon us on every occasion the evidences 
of our kinship with the brute, and never has the 
time or the inclination to seek proofs of our kin- 
ship with the Divine ; and how often it poses 
(of course, unjustly enough) as the latest Word 
of Science about us ! 

To be sure the real trouble is, that in our own 
daily lives, and their actual experience, there 
is so much to give comfort to these belittling 
views. There, if we wished, or even against our 
wish, we might find much which, coldly scru- 
tinized, will awaken no admiration, hardly even 
respect. Nay, we may leave out of consideration 
faults and vices of character altogether ; and in 
the unavoidable transactions of the earthward 
side of our existence will see what appears to 
detract from the dignity of human life. When 
we sit down, under the cloud of some particu- 
larly depressing mood, and think it all over, — 
the lifeless routine, the spiritless drudgeries, the 
petty economies, the trivial concerns about the 

6 



82 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

outward fashion of our conduct and the comment 
of our neighbors, the many miserable slaveries 
to which by our own weakness we submit, as 
well as the self-denials which, half-heartedly un- 
dergone, leave us often more embittered than 
ennobled; every profession and calling con- 
fronted with the vital bread-and-butter question, 
and every variety of service in Church and Na- 
tion turned into a marketable commodity, or a 
means of gratifying personal ambition, — I say, 
when in this mood we think it all over, and 
array all the facts of this baser class as wit- 
nesses, surely the verdict is not long delayed, 
'' Human life is not a very noble thing ! '' 

Therefore the more need to reassert its essen- 
tial dignity. And is it not one aim of the Gos- 
pel of the Son of Man to do this very thing ? 

Who can help seeing that the mere fact of the 
association of Jesus with our earth-life has un- 
speakably elevated and ennobled and dignified 
humanity ? As after the visit of a royal per- 
sonage the table at which he dined, the chair on 
which he sat, the door at which he entered, the 
street along which his equipage was drawn, are 
shown to the admiring gaze of loyal subjects, and 
henceforth are distinguished and held higher and 
worthy of remembrance in future years, — so has 
everything that this King's Son in His earthly 
sojourn touched become ennobled. And thank 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 83 

God He has touched everything ! He touched 
infancy : it has been a holier thing by reason of 
the Christ-child. He touched youth : it became 
thoughtful as well as hopeful, obedient and seri- 
ous as well as daring ; young manhood, and 
His unobtrusive industry sanctified the service of 
waiting till God calls ; mature life, and its bur- 
dens were lifted out of despondency, its battles 
offset by an unfailing inward peace, its round of 
duties transfigured by the thought, "It is My 
meat and drink to do the will of Him that sent 
Me." He touched the sorrows and troubles of 
humanity : the prayer, " Not My will, but Thine, 
be done," has given them all a new meaning. 
Death itself He touched, and His assurance, " He 
that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he 
live," followed by His own Calvary and His Eas- 
ter morning, transformed the indignity of the 
grave into a triumphal entrance to fuller life. 
He touched, though not by personal participa- 
tion, the sins and vices of humanity : sympathy 
for the transgressor, charity for the erring, an 
open door of return for the worst prodigal, — 
this is what has come of His taking hold of fal- 
len man. Think, then, for a moment what the 
human life would be without these transforming 
influences that have come into the thought and 
feeling of men from the visit of the Blessed 
Lord to these earth-shores, from those touches 



84 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

of ennoblement on every age, condition, and 
circumstance ! 

And think again. A royal visitor might thus 
pass through a province, leaving on every hand 
tokens of benevolence, of enduring influence for 
good perhaps ; yet as a stranger only he might 
come, as a stranger sojourn, as a stranger return 
to his regal home. 

Not so with this Son of Man. Let us again be 
reminded that he identifies Himself completely 
with us ; He becomes a naturalized citizen of our 
country, sharing what we have, foregoing what 
we have not ; He empties Himself ; He takes up 
the whole great load of the human life, — takes 
it as He finds, makes no complaint of its hard 
conditions, but lives under them the True Man. 

I do not believe any of us half realize how hard 
Jesus' life was, — speaking of it simply in the 
way of daily conduct, doing one by one the things 
He found Himself called to do as a man deter- 
mined to live a right life, — simply that, with- 
out regard to His unique mission. And it was a 
grand life He lived ; no candid, thoughtful man 
but will reverently acknowledge it. There was 
nothing small, nothing perfunctory, nothing medi- 
ocre, nothing mercenary, in it or about it ; it 
was a towering mountain-peak of high thinking, 
feeling, doing, and the more so that it was all 
without show of being heroic. 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. •SS 

Such a life, you and I are wont to think, is 
possible to the smallest minority only of those 
most favorably circumsj:anced, — everything in 
their culture^ their means,, their surroundings, 
their family, their friends, their land, and their 
times conspiring to bring to flower and fruit the 
finest possibilities of human life. All untoward 
elements of birth and education and calling and 
associations and external influences must be as 
far as possible eliminated; then you may get a 
noble and harmonious human life. Perhaps we 
are not altogether wrong ; but let us examine 
more closely Jesus' case. 

If great men are the product of the age in 
which they appear^ then look for no Christ in the 
age of Tiberius and Herod, — an age when the 
political fabrics were going to rapid dissolution, 
and the thought of neither Jew nor Gentile any 
longer held fast to mighty convictions or lofty 
ideals. What an atmosphere for a Jesus to 
breathe ! 

Is'or was there a nation remote from civilized 
luxury and corruption, stern in primitive in- 
tegrity, patriotic even if not powerful, out of 
which He might arise, recognized of them as 
their choicest representative and their truest son. 
Alas ! Israel, you well know, was not such a 
nation. An unclean foreigner lording it over 
their religion ; Rome-fawning dandies filling a 



86 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

mock-royal court whose kingship had to be 
begged from every successive emperor ; insurrec- 
tion and riot in the capital, — uprisings without 
dignity or character, — there was no national life 
there that should make it on any account a proud 
thing for a man to say, ^^I am a Jew." And 
when He came, ^^His own received Him not." 
There was no nation to help this Jesus to be 
its hero. 

How was it with His family and kin ? There 
was help there, — a godly mother, with her work 
of early training. There was integrity ; there 
was industry. There were simply those things 
which would combine to help a boy to become a 
plain, honest, God-fearing man, — just, by the 
way, what most people among us would not 
much covet. He abode in that humble life till 
He began to teach, being then about thirty years 
of age. But what concerns us now is this : 
When Jesus does launch forth upon a larger, 
higher life, it certainly is not His family and His 
kin that urge or help Him on. He awakens op- 
position by His teaching ; timidly His mother 
and brethren press on through the crowd that 
surrounds Him, hoping to make Him desist. He 
is gathering disciples ; but His own brethren do 
not believe in Him. For His enthusiasm they 
have no sympathy ; His undertaking is to them 
probably erratic, perhaps presumptuous ; His 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 87 

ideals to them are dreams, — dangerous dreams, 
illusions. 

One more circumstance let us note, for it is 
deemed an all important one. Jesus enlarged 
His life, carried it to ever higher planes of use- 
fulness and influence, by no improvement of His 
worldly condition. Let us state the plain fact : 
culture, as men called it, Jesus had not. There 
had been no opportunity for it in His family cir- 
cumstances. Perfect politeness, — expression of 
a kind and thoughtful heart ; sensitiveness to the 
proprieties, though far as possible from the petty 
anxieties of etiquette ; keen intelligence, as of 
thinker, seer, philosopher, but not the learning of 
the scholar ; a store of sacred knowledge out of 
the Scriptures, but not the book-worm accumula- 
tions of the Scribes ; a love of beauty fed on 
familiar sights of grass, and flowers, and birds of 
the air, the simple poetry of nature and our com- 
mon life seen in tenderness and sympathy and 
faith, — such as these constitute a culture that 
was real, genuine, priceless, but not the kind of 
culture which "society" in His day or in ours 
would call by that name. This is the plain fact. 
And His culture being of this kind. He could be 
and could remain the true nobleman even while 
He had not where to lay His head. If it abso- 
lutely requires libraries, pictures, works of art, 
elegance, and civilized refinements to exhibit 



88 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

the highest dignity of human life, — to raise up 
our existence to a level where it shall command 
respect, admiration, reverence, — then all we can 
say to Christians is : the highest, most digni- 
fied, Life that our poor earth ever knew was 
lived without these. 

And remember how I For it was not in her- 
mit retirement; not in renunciation of these 
things from sheer disdain of them. He still 
lived a life among men ; and all this which He 
endured, — the poverty, the comparative friend- 
lessness, the rancor of unjust animosities, — all 
this did not embitter Him, did not sour His tem- 
per, did not cast a gloom on His views of life, did 
not distort His vision, did not wring from Him 
one impatient word, one morbid syllable. 

One thing is established : this human life can 
be lived in a noble way, and that too in circum- 
stances commonly deemed the most prosaic, dis- 
heartening, depressing, embittering. Poverty 
shall not necessarily prevent it ; the loneliness of 
being misunderstood and hated without cause 
shall not forbid it ; no dulness of the times, of 
the generation in which we live, of the vocation 
we are compelled to follow, shall defeat it : it 
can he so lived because it has been so lived. The 
conditions are not of themselves so degrading as 
to make it impossible. If you ask. What are the 
possibilities of human life ? I answer in a word, 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 89 

Jesus Christ. Do I mean of your life, of my own 
life ? The record gives me no choice but to say, 
Yes. We have no right to seek Jesus' glory by 
arguing, " What He was no one else can be or can 
become." He does not choose to be exalted in 
that way. Far off in our case, because our case 
is one of desperate moral enfeeblement through 
sin, far off and yet approaching nearer daily 
if we are sincere disciples, — is this becoming 
just like Jesus. That is the definite goal of 
Christian hope and effort. We must reach it by 
little steps ; but every step counts. 

Do not look too far for Christ-like attainments ; 
they are under your very eyes, if you will but 
look. There is a noble, heavenly dignity in all 
manner of toil and help : there is dignity in the 
drudgery ; there is dignity in the so-called hum- 
ble graces ; dignity in patience, in the little chari- 
ties, the caresses that warm and cheer the loved 
one at your side, the little courtesies, the little 
acts of self-control, the little unseen tests of 
bravery oft endured, — more brave than the 
valor that takes cities by storm. When we learn 
this lesson, we begin to approach in kind the 
dignity of Jesus' life. Outward grandeur that 
had not; it by inward grandeur exalted every- 
thing He said and did : no other life has ever so 
done that ; therefore is His the noblest. 

How shall we find the power to hold to so 



90 THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 

high a resolve ? Not in ourselves, — no, God be 
thanked! we are not expected to find that in 
ourselves. " He taketh hold " of our lives, if we 
permit Him, and becomes our Saviour by lifting 
up and holding up our life where it should be. 
Nay, it will be His life in ours, upon ours, along- 
side ours; so ever-present that our familiar 
streets and shops and dwelling-places shall be 
as much linked with Him as the oft-named places 
of Judea and Galilee, and everywhere we shall 
feel the solemnity of hallowed association. 

" This is the earth He walked on ; not alone 
That Asian country keeps the sacred stain ; 
'T is not alone the far Judean plain, 
Mountain and river ! Lo, the sun that shone 

On Him, shines now on us ; when day is gone 
The moon of Galilee comes forth again 
And lights our paths as His. . . . 

The air we breathe He breathed, — the very air 
That took the mould and music of His high 
And godlike speech. Since then shall mortal dare 

With base thought front the ever-sacred sky, 
Soil with foul deed the ground whereon He laid 
In holy death His pale, immortal head ? " 

Yes, truly ours too is a Holy Land. Our life 
too should be, is called to be, a Divine life. For 
this purpose He became flesh and dwelt among 
us, — to hallow our human life, show its possi- 
bilities and its original intent by His own living, 
and give unto all who will receive Him the power 
to become sons of God. 



THE HUMAN LIFE DIVINE. 91 

" Oh, mean may seem this house of clay, 
Yet 't was the Lord^s abode ; 
Our feet may mourn this thorny way, 
Yet here Immanuel trode. 

'* Oh, mighty grace, our life to live, 
To make our earth divine ! 
Oh, mighty grace Thy heaven to give. 
And lift our life to Thine I " 



VII. 



Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father 
is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their afflic- 
tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. — 
James i. 27. 



VII. 

PUKE EELIGION. 

AMODEEN writer! tells the story of two 
old men, Yefim and Yelisei, neighbors in 
a Kussian village, who resolved to make a pious 
pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Having arranged their 
affairs at home, and provided themselves with 
the necessaries for so long a journey, which was 
to be accomplished on foot, they turned their 
faces toward the Holy City. After journeying 
some weeks they passed through a famine-stricken 
region, and found the distress greater and greater 
as they went. 

One day as they were going through a large 
village, Yelisei, weary and faint with thirst, 
turned into a hut for a drink of water. Now 
Yefim was stronger than his companion, and not 
caring to stop he went on, leaving Yelisei to 
overtake him. We may remark, by the way, 
that Yefim was one of those men whose habits 
are correct, but whose nature has become self- 
centred and rather cold and devoid of sympathy 
and tenderness, — a good man, doubtless, but 
1 Count Tolstoi. 



96 PURE RELIGION. 

one whose goodness was rather chilling and dis- 
couraging, while Yelisei was perhaps lacking in 
what his neighbor would term " strength of char- 
acter ; '^ but in all his dealings loved his neigh- 
bor as himself, had a childlike trust and affection 
toward his Father in heaven, and was always 
open to any call for help and sympathy. Well, 
Yelisei knocked at the door of the hut to get his 
drink of water. No one opened. Jle went in. 
He found a whole family starving, ill, filthy 
because no one had cared for them and they 
could not care for themselves. He gave them 
of his bread. He found his drink himself ; then 
kindled a fire, cooked food, went out and made 
purchases ; set the house in order, nursed the 
sick as best he could ; the work was so much and 
so necessary to be done, he forgot his pilgrimage 
and his companion. Evening came. He could 
not leave. He stayed another day, and another. 
To leave would have meant giving these people 
over to death ; to have left them to die in the 
first place would have been more merciful. Har- 
vest was at hand. The man of the house was 
getting able to work now, but his field had been 
taken from him, his implements he had sold. 
Yelisei redeemed the mortgage; bought a nag 
and cart, and brought back the scythe. He pro- 
vided some food for immediate use. All this he 
did, without previous intention, but feeling the 



PURE RELIGION. 97 

necessity and yielding to what seemed God's will. 
Early the fifth day, before the family were 
awake, he took his departure. 

Meanwhile Yefim had waited, and gone on, and 
expected at every halt to be overtaken by Yel- 
isei. Not at Odessa, not on shipboard, not at 
Jerusalem, was any trace of him. Yefim visits 
the holy places. He goes to the chapel of the 
Sepulchre. Wonder of wonders ! in the most 
privileged spot of the sacred place he seems to 
see his companion standing — waits for him after 
service, but fails to meet him or to learn any- 
thing about him. Three times this same thing 
happens ; Yefim fails each time, and at length, 
his money spent, himself pretty much the same 
Yefim still, returns to his home ; he has accom- 
plished his pilgrimage. 

Yelisei on that fifth day looked into his purse 
and saw he had not enough to cross the water 
with, much less visit Jerusalem and return. He 
commended himself to God^s mercy, trusting 
sometime in the future to redeem his vow, and 
came back to his people. 

But the story does not end here. At Yefim's 
home all seems to have gone wrong. A year he 
had been absent ; his son had gone from bad' to 
worse with drink; his affairs, though he was well- 
to-do, were in a distracted condition. Yelisei, on 
the contrary, when he comes back, is prospered 

7 



98 PURE RELIGION. 

in his bees and his farming as he had never been, 
and, content with little, this home was now in its 
modest abundance unboundedly happy and grate- 
ful. And this is not all. The family whom the 
good man saved from death knew not who the 
stranger was, — only that he was a pilgrim. So 
they sought to requite his goodness by showing 
kindness to all pilgrims ; and also to Yefim on 
his return they gave hospitable entertainment, 
and told him their story. " If he had not come 
to us," said the peasant, "we should all have 
died in our sins. We were perishing in despair ; 
we murmured against God and against men. 
But he set us on our feet ; and through him we 
learned to know God, and we shave come to be- 
lieve that there are good people. Christ bless 
him! Before, we lived like cattle; he made us 
men." 

Such is this story of "The Two Pilgrims," 
which every one ought to read. It raises the 
question. Which of these two made the true pil- 
grimage ? Will not our text teach us to answer : 
A true pilgrimage before our God and Father is 
this, to visit the holy places where Christ is in 
the persons of His needy brethren, and to minis- 
ter unto them ? As one has happily paraphrased 
it, " The pure ritual, undefiled in God's sight, is 
the ritual of Christian tenderness, the activity of 
Christian love." 



PURE RELIGION. 99 

The apostle James was not one of those who 
belittle public worship and Church ordinances. 
He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews ; in observance 
of all which the law prescribed he was so exact 
and scrupulous that, Christian though he was, the 
Jews of Jerusalem called him ^^the Just." He 
loved the Temple, with all its hallowed associa- 
tions, its stately ritual ; he loved the religious 
customs of Israel ; he loved, moreover, the order 
and the institutions of the Christian Church. 
When, therefore, he says that the true worship 
is in the devotion of good deeds of unselfish love, 
we may be assured that the words are not from 
one who delights in standing outside the walls of 
the Christian Church and flinging stones at her 
windows. There is in the utterance nothing dis- 
dainful or cynical. He expresses himself thus 
because he so profoundly feels the necessity that 
love and good deeds should rise up continually as 
fragrant incense from the Christian life ; because 
of the profound conviction that without this sac- 
rifice no sacrifice of confession, prayer, or psalm 
can do God any honor at all. 

And see how reasonable it is, once you give it 
careful thought. The public worship of God in 
all the various acts whereby we openly proclaim 
ourselves to be His has its undoubted value ; and 
that value lies in this, that by such a proclama- 
tion we put ourselves anew on the right side, — 



100 PURE RELIGION. 

we again commit ourselves to all that is highest 
and best, at the same time that we encourage and 
incite others to put themselves with us under our 
God and Father, to honor Him by obedience ; and 
that in a sense is what we might call the philos- 
ophy of worship, on its human side. 

But by so much as words are .cheaper than 
offerings and professions easier than their fulfil- 
ment in conduct, by so much may public worship 
— the ritual of the sanctuary — fall short of that 
other ritual of which the apostle James speaks. 
And the doing of those things which go to make 
up this ritual, this "religion pure and undefiled 
before our God and Father," will exert an influ- 
ence like the influence of public worship, — the 
same in kind, but greater. A man turns out good 
work, or in his professional services is courteous 
and obliging : it is easy to say, " He does so for 
his own advantage." This may be the case or 
it may not. A man is kind to his family, his 
friends : it is easy to say, " It is only loving him- 
self in another form, — it is his he cares for." 
But there are some forms of love and some good 
deeds which cannot fall under any such suspicion. 
When Yelisei spends his time and empties his 
purse for a family of beggared peasants v/hom he 
never saw till yesterday, and from whom he can 
expect no favor in return, the kindness is under 
no suspicion. Of such Bort is " visiting the 



PUBE RELIGION. 101 

fatherless and widows.'' The expression had 
become proverbial in Israel ; it signified doing 
good to those who could urge no claim and hold 
out no inducement of reward. This was charity, 
mercy, love unadulterated ; this was kindness, 
pure and simple, — not like so much of giving of 
presents and bestowing of favors, which expects 
an equivalent sooner or later. Such as this our 
Lord had in mind when He said : " When thou 
makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, 
nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor thy neigh- 
bors, lest haply they also bid thee again, and 
a recompense be made thee. But when thou 
makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed, the 
lame, the blind ; and thou shalt be blessed, 
because they have not w^herewith to recompense 
thee.'' 

You say such things will be very rare. I do 
not deny it. Just in that degree do they stand 
out clear and significant. There may be shallow 
worldlings who will say that the man who would 
do thus must be a fool. Let the world say what 
it pleases, the man's witness will still be seen and 
heard. 

" How far that little candle throws his beam ! 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world." 

And wherever it shines it is a testimony to the 
presence of a Power that can compel such forget 



102 PURE RELIGION. 

fulness of self and make sacrifice sweet. It is a 
testimony of loyalty to another and higher idea 
than that of the world's opinion or a base self- 
interest ; it is a testimony of the worthiness and 
lovableness of that God who can inspire such 
loyalty and retain such a hold on the affections 
and the life. A man may speak the noble words 
of the creed of Christendom in the service of the 
sanctuary ; but in good deeds like those he utters 
the thing itself in action louder than words, — his 
faith and trust in the Eternal, whom he loves and 
serves, and whose he is. The one may be noth- 
ing more than saying, "Lord, Lord;'' the other 
is " doing the will of the Father in heaven." 
Which will best serve to make the Father known 
to men ? Which will be most sure to express the 
real meaning of a man's life 7 Which will most 
praise God ? 

Do you recall that excellent little story by 
Eose Terry Cooke, The Deacon^ s Week? The 
minister proposes instead of the Week of Prayer 
a Week of Practice. The congregation all fall in 
with the suggestion, except old Amos Tucker. At 
the end of the week, he has this to say: "Pd 
ruther go to forty-nine prayer meetin's than work 
at bein' good a week. I b'lieve my hope has been 
one of them that perish 5 it ha'n't worked, and I 
leave it behind to-day. 1 mean to begin honest, 
and it was seein' one honest Christian man 



PURE RELIGION. 103 

fetched me round to' t." The power of pure re- 
ligion and undefiled before our God and Father 
filled that week, and made it better, for all pur- 
poses of devotion and worship and evangelism, 
than the former week of prayer. 

But we must not forget the apostle's second 
clause. "And to keep himself unspotted from 
the world." 

The religion of Israel made much of cleansing 
of the person, the garments, the utensils ; cere- 
monial washings, especially in connection with 
worship. And what we have said before we 
must repeat here, that the writer of this Scrip- 
ture did not regard such ceremonial observances 
lightly. These ablutions he practised strictly. 
When therefore he warns us to attend more 
strictly to another kind of purity, we ought to 
attach the greater importance to the warning. 

We may, then be spotted. And it is the world 
from which we receive these spots. 

"In a marsh," says Kobertson, "each single 
plant is harmless ; the festering, noxious juices 
come out of the many." This miasma is that 
world of which the apostle speaks. 

We all know it very well. We know a world 
good and beautiful, in which it is a joy to live 
and breathe and work : a world such as that of 
the 24th and the 104th Psalms. The glories of 
the heavenly lights, the freshness of fields and 



104 PURE RELIGION 

woods in spring, the sparkling surface of the blue 
lake, the rippling brook and stream ; the honest 
work of head and hand, which is a joy and not a 
curse, in the mere doing of which there is rich 
reward ; the happiness of home with its affection 
and peace and cheerful mutual self-denials ; 
friendship's warm hand-grasp and beaming eye j 
the generous stirring of the love of country and 
the devotion to the commonwealth, which we call 
patriotism^ — put all these together, and you have 
the great good world in the midst of which God 
has set us, and for which we should daily thank 
Him. Let us not forget that there is this good 
world, and that it is ours. 

But neither let us forget that there is another 
world. It may seem to be the same world, but it 
is as different from it as day from night. It 
tends always to lead away from the Divine and 
toward the demon and the brute ; down, never up. 
It is the miasma generated from the poison of 
the many. It is not particularly here, or there ; 
it is intangible ; it is in the atmosphere. It be- 
smirches the whiteness of our sweet children, 
makes them familiar with things which even to 
know is defilement and burns like a red hot iron ! 
It makes us false, it makes us artificial, it makes 
us dishonest, it makes us greedy, it makes us 
weak to assert what we feel to be better, it m.akes 
us strong to run after evil. Don't you know that 



VIII. 



Knowing that ye were redeemed, not with corruptible 
things, with silver or gold, from your vain manner of life 
handed down from your fathers; but with precious blood, 
as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the 
blood of Christ. — 1 Peter i. 18, 19. 



VIII. 
THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

GOOD Friday! It is the day on which holy 
quiet, and meditation joined with prayer, 
were fittest, could our Puritan people but cast off 
the strange feeling that such observance was dis- 
loyalty to great principles. Singular and lam- 
entable misconception ! — when all the world is 
preparing to celebrate His victory with every 
emblem of gladness, that it should be per- 
chance of doubtful propriety for Christians to 
commemorate that victory's awful cost ! From 
the world, it is true, we need expect no encour- 
agement to such observance. The day will not 
lend itself to display or to easy enjoyment ; its 
lessons are too searching, its scenes too over- 
whelming, to afford topics for light chat and 
complacent after-comment; its appropriate ser- 
vice must be, of all in the year, freest from the 
things which the worldly mind can feast upon 
and discuss. No, it is not a day the world will 
bid us keep ! For us, however, unto whom He 



112 THE PKICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

is precious, are not the lines of Keble true, who 
asks, — 

" Is it uot strange, the darkest hour 
That ever dawn'd on sinful earth 
Should touch the heart with softer power 
For comfort, than an Angel's mirth ? ^' 

But how shall we worthily speak of that great 
Sacrifice ? For there can be, we feel, but one 
theme to-day. The Meaning of the Cross. 

The very spirit of the occasion will help us to 
approach it aright. At other times we might be 
easily led to discuss it as a theological proposi- 
tion; but when we bring before ourselves the 
very scenes through which our suffering Saviour 
moved, the mocking and the scourging, the dis- 
ciple's denial, the insults of the leaders, the 
hooting of the mob, the way of the cross, the 
fainting under the woeful burden, the ignominy 
of the criminals on either side, the agony, the 
thirst, the darkness, the expiring cry, — then to 
reduce it all to an abstraction, and deal with it 
in controversy or even in merely intellectual 
dissertation seems nothing less than sacrilegious. 
Verily it was not for this He suffered and died, 
chat we might spin fine theories, and exhibit our 
philosophical acumen, and strive with our breth- 
ren over words to no profit ! The reading of 
these last chapters of our Gospels will speedily 
recall us to the reality of . the great Sacrifice 



purp: religion. 105 

world ? It is its voice which says that this good 
thing you purpose is " impractical/' '' vis- 
ionary." It is its voice which sneers at your 
aspirations : " All very well to dream about, but 
that is n't the sort of world we are. living in." It 
is its power which turns magnificent gifts and 
opportunities aside from use for the public good, 
and makes pliant tools of public leaders and law 
makers. It is its poisonous influence which gets 
into us all like some horrible deadening, enervat- 
ing plague, so that we sit still, and let wrongs and 
lies go on, and say when too hard pressed, " It 
cannot be otherwise in this world." 

What are you going to do about it ? Possibly 
not much ; possibly not wrest any great trophy 
from this defiling power: but, with our eyes upon 
Him who also walked hourly in the midst of sin, 
who faced the foul Tempter in the wilderness and 
prevailed, and met the contradiction of sinners 
without yielding Truth or Right — let us say. 
Myself at least, by God's help,. I will keep from 
lying, from cheating, or from winking at lies and 
cheating ; myself at least I will respect as a child 
of God ; my manhood I will not sell for any vile 
barter of yours nor surrender for any impotent 
threat ! Can any Christian soul do less ? 

We believe we have a much better creed than 
Matthew Arnold's ; but perhaps, according to the 
apostle James, Matthew Arnold has a better reli- 



106 PURE RELIGION. 

gion than ours when he says^ of The fVorlcVs 
Triumplis : — 

" So far as I conceive the world's rebuke 

To him address'd who would recast her new, 
Not from herself her fame of strength she took, 
But from their weakness who would work her rue. 

♦" 'Behold/ she cries, ' so many rages lullM, 
So many fiery spirits quite cool'd down ; 
Look how so many valors, long undull'd, 

After short commerce with me, fear my frown ! 

" ' Thou too, when thou against my crimes wouldst cry, 
Let thy foreboded homage check thy tongue ! ' 
The world speaks well ; yet might her foe reply : 
• Are wills so weak ? — then let not mine wait long ! 

*' ' Hast thou so rare a poison ? — let me be 
Keener to slay thee, lest thou poison me ! ' " 

^^What will yon do about it?" Guard your- 
self, says the apostle. Go into it and go through 
it you must ; just as our Blessed Lord did. No 
dreamy, harmless land of ease, where you may 
abide till life be past — God has no such country 
for you to dwell in. " I pray not/^ said Christ, 
"that Thou shouldst take them out of the 
world, but that Thou shouldst keep them from 
the evil one." Were these vain or idle words? 
If not, then give heed to them. As I have said, 
perhaps you cannot wrest many trophies from 
this world ; in other words, perhaps you cannot 
put down many evils and wrongs, or accomplish 



PURE RELIGION. 107 

signal reforms; but guard yourself jovl can, and 
Christ's prayer and God's help are with you in 
that. 

Keep yourself unspotted from the world ! But 
you are spotted already ? Alas, who is not ? 
Well, scarred let us come into the kingdom, since 
otherwise it cannot be ; stained with those old 
stains of the past, but, by God's grace, not with 
any more like them from this day forth. Mark 
what I say. The ^vorld may take those Com- 
mandments of God and add its nullifying clause 
to each, and call its revision Public Opinion, or 
Fashion, or Political Platform, or Business, or 
what not: what ha\^e you to do with that? 
Study Christ's example. What He needed to 
avoid, so as not to spot Himself, that it would 
hardly be safe for you to have much to do with. 
Especially what He tells you in so many words 
to abstain from, that shun. With most constant 
care and earnest effort you may again and again 
be betrayed. You may err and fall ; but it will 
be vastly different from the too common spotting 
and soiling of Christians' characters and lives ; 
men will see that you have some decent regard 
for the high and holy things you profess, and 
they will honor you, your faith, and your God. 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 113 

which we have done so much to hide behind our 
formulas. Let the day bring us face to face 
with the Fact of the offering, remembering that 
this is what our souls need, this is what hu- 
manity needs, this will glorify Him who was 
lifted up on the accursed tree. 

At first sight it might appear that the text w^e 
have taken from Saint Peter was precisely such 
as would not lead us to the Fact, but rather fur- 
nish us with a doctrine concerning the Fact. 
Closer attention will convince us, however, that 
the whole aim and purpose of the apostle's writ- 
ing is practical; that he is endeavoring not so 
much to inculcate sound views as to bring us to 
right attitude and right conduct. In keeping 
with that purpose he lays hold of this most 
solemn matter of the death of Christ, not on the 
theoretical side, but altogether on the fact side : 
" Ye were redeemed with precious blood, as of 
a lamb without blemish and without spot, even 
the blood of Christ.'^ It is as if he had said : " If 
ye are in anything better men than ye were, it 
cost Jesus Christ His life to secure it. Live ac- 
cordingly, then ; in grateful obedience acknowl- 
edging the debt, and willing to be entirely 
His.'' 

The price and the purchase, — this is the great 

truth which we would once more bring home to 

ourselves. We are well aware of a popular 

8 



1:^4 THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

repugnance to all that looks like a commercial 
presentation of the Atonement, and we confess 
we share it ; but we feel equally certain that 
there is nothing essentially degrading to the 
sacrifice of our Lord when we regard it as a 
price He paid. 

The soldier leaves his family, the comforts of 
his home, and the profits of his business that he 
may serve his country^s cause ; he yields his life 
on the field of battle, or with more tedious suffer- 
ing in the crowded hospital; he lays down his 
life as a price, and we deem it honorable to view 
it in that light. The physician, in a time of epi- 
demic, when the community is panic-stricken, and 
the baser instinct of men is to flee as for their 
lives, remains at his post, goes from bedside to 
bedside, stoops over the dying, and breathes the 
poison, works day and night that he may relieve 
and save where it is possible, and finally is him- 
self carried off by the disease : his life, too, we 
regard as a price nobly paid. A young priest 
sees an island filling up with a population of 
lepers. Cut off from all society save of their 
fellow-sufferers, having bid farewell to their 
friends, they are cast into that grave of living 
death, doomed, and yet compelled perhaps for 
years to linger on earth ; the young priest is 
moved with compassion, bids farewell to the 
world, goes in health to take up his abode among 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 115 

that dying people, to share their life and bring 
them what comfort he may for body and soul; 
he becomes, as was inevitable, a leper himself, 
and in the course of a few years dies as his fel- 
lows are dying : Father Damien pays his life as 
a price. 

A price, — that is, simply, the payment of 
what secures the desired object. The national 
life is threatened, the national liberty is at stake, 
— will be lost except patriotism respond and make 
prompt offering; the soldier's life then is the 
price, and the national life or the national liberty 
is the purchase. This is no theory ; this is sim- 
ple fact. Moreover it is not an atrocious transac- 
tion. "Sweet," said the pagan poet, "is it to 
die for native land." Or the health, perhaps the 
very life of the community is imperilled by the 
invasion of the plague ; men, women, and children 
will die by scores and hundreds unless prompt 
measures are taken and thorough-going effec- 
tive treatment be at once applied ; the physician's 
life then, which he takes in his hands as he goes 
in and out and does the work of six men and for- 
gets himself because of the terrible need, — that 
is the price ; and lives saved and the disease 
stamped out are the purchase. Again not theory, 
but simple fact, whereby his memory is cherished 
as that of one who was an honor to his profession, 
a lover of mankind. And Molokai, — it had been. 



116 THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

without Father Damien, a hell on earth. No law, 
no restraint, the anarchy of despair, the beastli- 
ness natural to those who had been cast off like 
corpses from the presence of the living, the hope- 
less horror of continued existence which was not 
life, — before it could be changed so that there 
might be some comfort of human companionship, 
some order to protect the more helpless, some 
ministration to the needs of body and soul, there 
had to be one willing to leave his life, to make 
absolute sacrifice of it. Father Damien's life was 
the price paid for humanized Molokai. 

Note one thing more : just as the patriot's, the 
physician's, the leper-priest's sacrifice commands 
the reverence of all right-thinking men, the full 
approval of reason and conscience, when the ob- 
ject is a sufficient one, so, on the other hand, the 
transaction is belittled before our moral judg- 
ment when the object is inadequate. The sol- 
dier who dies for conquest or ^^ glory," the 
physician who should die for the lack of wise 
precaution or from boastful recklessness, or the 
' minister who should go among the lepers (if you 
could conceive it), for the sake of notoriety, and 
lose his life, would be throwing himself away, 
and Avould not be entitled to honor. Waste is 
not sacrifice. Price demands for its spending an 
equivalent ; the purchase must be a worthy one. 
or the transaction cannot even win our respect. 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 117 

— SO thoroughly, deeply ethical is this principle 
of sacrifice wherever applied. 

Now, our Lord Jesus deliberately entered upon 
a course, consciously and intentionally pursued a 
course, which He from the first could expect, and 
more and more could clearly see, would lead to 
violent death, if He persisted in it. '^Iso man 
had power to take it from Him.'' Indeed, no 
true sacrifice can be exacted. He saw the in- 
vaded land, the plague-smitten city, the leper 
island, and He saw also that deliverance was 
possible if the price of deliverance were paid; 
and He paid it, — yes. He paid it, not in theology, 
but in actual fact. Think of it, I pray you, on 
the fact side ! Let it be not less real a girding 
up of energies, an arousal of holy love, a resolute 
going forth, than the leper-priest's sacrifice shows 
us. No matter about differing theories of atone- 
ment, expiation, propitiation, and all that, which 
have troubled you so much ; let them pass. Is 
it not a simple glorious fact that when our 
Blessed Lord saw the woe of humanity He reso- 
lutely went forth to put His life into the work of 
deliverance, and that He laid down the life, and 
that in consequence deliverance was achieved ? 

If this be so in fact, why then should there be 
so much protest against the presentation of our 
Lord's sacrifice as the price of our salvation ? 

For two reasons : — 



118 THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

In the first place, because sometimes the pur- 
chase is so represented that we cannot regard 
it as a worthy one. If that sinless life of the 
Son of God was laid down to purchase for men 
in some way exemption from the pain and pen- 
alty of sin, — a sort of immunity from the con- 
sequences of their evil-doing, if that was the 
great and central object for which He endured 
even the cross, then — we say it out of very 
reverence — then was too great a price paid for 
the thing obtained. It is as if a mother in daily 
tender solicitude sacrificed herself for her boy 
wearing herself out for him, at last by one final 
effort breaking herself down and yielding up her 
life, in order that he might suffer no discomfort, 
have every wish gratified, be spared all pain and 
suffering, and whenever he had done wrong might 
escape the bitter consequences. That might be 
a fond mother, but scarcely a wise one ; and her 
sacrifice would command little respect, seeing it 
only served to pamper the child, whom she should 
have trained to manhood. Thus it is that by a 
low conception of what salvation is, the very sac- 
rifice of our Eedeemer is belittled and degraded. 

But if, on the other hand, by His doing what 
He did all His life long, and at last supremely on 
Calvary, — if by this sacrifice He should some- 
how make sure man's renunciation of sin, should 
break the bondage, should bring out of the prison- 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 119 

house a people of slaves and make them a nation 
of holy freedmen, whose numbers sliould swell 
age after age, whose freedom should grow more 
perfect year after year, then the purchase might 
justify the price. Eeason and conscience fall 
down in reverence before such sacrifice. 

And is not that substantially what Saint Peter 
suggests in the striking phrase, *^ redeemed from 
your vain manner of life handed down from your 
fathers " ? A wrong life, a perverted life, wait- 
ing to be righted; an empty life waiting to be 
filled ; a life maintained in vanity from the ter- 
ribly tenacious force of habit, yet nevertheless to 
be revolutionized, — that is a great, a sufficient, 
undertaking, before which all mere human effort 
and sacrifice must stand helpless and dumb 5 it 
demanded a mightier. 

" loving wisdom of my God ! 
When all was sin and shame, 
A second Adam to the fight, 
And to the rescue came. 

" O generous love ! that He who smote 
In Man for man the foe 
The double agony in Man 
For man should undergo ; 

** And in the garden secretly, 
And on the cross on high, 
Should teach His brethren, and inspire 
To suffer and to die." 



120 THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

And here we may recur to the illustration of 
the mother's sacrifice. Let her do all she can do, 
let her withhold nothing, let her spend herself, lay- 
down her very life, — always supposing that her 
end cannot be attained by less, — but let her do 
it to make a man of her son, to win him from 
every evil influence, to strengthen in him every 
good principle, to bring him daily into closer and 
closer accord with her own high aims till he shall 
see with her eyes and be filled even with that 
same spirit of sacrifice which possesses her ; when 
the process has reached that point, all her sacri- 
fice stands clearly vindicated and justified. 

So is it with the sacrifice of Christ. The price 
purchases not merely this poor recruit of to-day, 
and that unstable, immature disciple with yet so 
much to be rid of and so much to gain ; the pur- 
chase is of men and women like Him, Like Him 
we are to become, when all His work in us has 
had its full operation, when the process is com- 
plete, — then shall He indeed see of the travail of 
His soul and be satisfied. Not only in respect of 
purity from sin, but in this very capacity of sacri- 
fice, we are to become like Him ; and when the 
sacrifice of Him has issued in the sacrifice in us, 
— the very image and pattern of the Lamb of 
God reproduced in ourselves, — then it will 
appear that there was highest reason in the 
payment of the price. 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 121 

But perhaps the protest against calling our 
Lord's sacrifice a price is due still more to a sup- 
posed implication that that price is exacted by 
God. In answer to that there is far more to be 
said than we now have opportunity to say. 

And first, again, let us hold to the fact-side of 
this high and holy transaction ; let us remember 
that the theories by which men seek to explain 
facts philosophically are quite distinct and sep- 
arate things from the facts themselves. We are, 
as it were, gazing upon Calvary to-day. Let us 
not descend from that sacred height. 

" Is the price paid to God ? " Aside from hu- 
man pictures of a Deity to be appeased, which let 
us shut out, is there anything to shock us in so 
regarding it ? As a matter of fact, men must lay 
down their lives to save and help their fellows, 
in manifold ways ; is it any shock to our moral 
sense to think of their paying the price to God, — 
that, in other words, the necessity for sacrifice is 
Divine, granted certain conditions ? Nay, is not 
this the sweetness of sacrifice, that what we first 
received from God that we return to Him of our 
own accord ? Or is the love which is the root of 
sacrifice, man-originated ? No ; let us remember 
the prayer of Saint Augustine, " Grant what Thou 
askest, then ask what Thou wilt.'' Though God 
did exact the sacrifice, is not He the Source of 
sacrifice, the Fountain of love ? Is it not the 



122 THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 

very joy of sonship to come to the Father bring- 
ing what attests the oneness by which we are 
His ? Where, then, though the Father asked the 
price of the well-beloved Son, — where is the 
" cruelty,'' and the " vengefulness ? '' 

In any case, has not the fact that the sacrifice 
was for deliverance from sin, not for deliverance 
from punishment, set the whole matter in a dif- 
ferent light ? Not to satisfy the King's offended 
Majesty, not to placate His wrath, but to restore 
the lost sons of men to Himself and to their 
true selves, does He give His only begotten Son 
to a life which was daily sacrifice, but sacrifice 
in which that Son rejoiced ! 

We are told of a religious picture in a certain 
city in Germany, in which God is represented as 
shooting wrathful arrows down on sinners, Christ 
as intercepting and breaking them. Ethically, 
that God is lower in the scale than that Christ. 
Charles Kingsley emphasizes this glorious truth, 
that it was God in Christ that offered sacrifice 
for man, when he says, " If it was not God, if it 
was a human Christ, or the human in Christ, then 
are we left with man better than God ! " God is 
in truth that Love that offers Itself upon the 
cross ! 

But there we touch mystery so deep that we 
recoil — mystery, not in that it contradicts what 
we know and have elsewhere seen, but mystery in 



THE PRICE AND THE PURCHASE. 123 

that we cannot fathom, cannot conceive the In- 
finity which breaks upon us of what is loveliest, 
highest, truest as we find it, a little of it, in man ! 
Sacrifice, is it not everywhere ? Is it not the 
very crown of human life ? Was it not because 
in this He was complete, that to Him was given 
the Name that is above every name ? And what 
if that great Eeality ran through the eternities, 
was somehow in the very heart and bosom of the 
Eternal ? For saith not the Apocalypse that '^the 
Lamb was slain from the foundation of the 
world " ? If this be so eternal a principle, must 
it not be that " if He be lifted up He will draw 
all men unto Him '^ ? 

Oh that we could be more content to let the 
Cross simply preach for itself; to set forth, on 
our part, first and chiefly, the Fact of the Sacrifice, 
the actual not the philosophical Price and Pur- 
chase ! Thus exhibited, the supreme characteris- 
tic of our Lord's life from its very beginning, 
manifested in increasing power until it cul- 
minates on Calvary — who will refuse to fall 
down before " the Lamb that taketh away the sin 
of the world''? 

Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from 
our sins by His blood ; and He made us to be a 
kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father ; 
to Him be the glory and the dominion forever 
and ever. Amen. 



IX. 

%n €a0ttt J>ummon3ef, 



Wherefore he saith,— 

"Awake, thou that sleepest, 
And arise from the dead, 
And Christ shall shine upon thee." 

Ephesians v. 14. 



IX. 

AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

WHENCE the apostle takes this quotation 
we do not know. The words are not 
from the Old Testament Scripture, nor can we 
trace them to any apocryphal writing. It is 
therefore commonly supposed that we have here 
a stanza from an early Christian hymn ; and 
both the form and the spirit of the lines accord 
well with such a supposition. They have in 
them the ring of an inspiring song, such as we 
might expect to have been sung by disciples in 
those days of the first great enthusiasm. 

We have chosen these words for an Easter 
textj because, ■- while they have no special ref- 
erence to Our Lord's rising from the dead, nor 
to our own, they point, in a way, to the substan- 
tial meaning of all resurrection. And what is 
the meaning of resurrection ? Simply this, we 
take it : the rising out of an old, partial, worn- 
out life into a new, vigorous, and larger life. 
Whatever else it may mean for us to have " this 
earthly house dissolved'' and ^^ enter into an 



128 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

heavenly," clearly it does mean a rising out of 
the old, partial, worn-out life of earth, into one 
new, vigorous, and vastly larger in a spirit-world. 
Must it not be that when we emerge into the 
light of that glorious day, we shall feel as those 
awaking out of sleep ? With the pulse-beat of 
that life so full and strong, will it not seem as 
if the earth-life itself had been death? ^^Res- 
urrection" in the Christian sense means surely 
as much as that. 

But these words quoted by Saint Paul, — 

" Awake, thou that sleepest, 
And arise from the dead, 
And Christ shall shine upon thee," 

are evidently for immediate, mundane applica- 
tion. Spoken to the living, not the dying, for the 
present, not some future, near or remote, they 
necessarily refer to something other than literal 
resurrection, — plainly, some figurative resurrec- 
tion ; only we do not like the expression " figura- 
tive," because that leaves in many minds the 
thought that it is "not real." We might call it 
a spiritual resurrection ; but there again the ob- 
jection arises that to many people a "spiritual" 
resurrection will mean as little as a " figurative " 
one ; " spiritual," alas ! is too commonly held 
synonymous with "shadowy" and "unsubstan- 
tial." Let us venture, then, to call it — without 
claiming to have hit upon, the exactly fitting 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 129 

phrase — a moral resurrection ; at all events, it 
is a resurrection which is to take place with us 
here and now, and for which, it appears, we are 
ourselves held responsible. 

And let us see if we may not make plain to 
ourselves, from our own experiences and observa- 
tions, the force of Saint Paul's appeal. 

In the history of every man and woman there 
are epochs. In some lives there are more than 
in others ; in some they crowd more closely and 
follow more nearly upon each other; in some 
they make a far more decided break, lift up 
character to a far higher level, and more sud- 
denly, — or, alas ! more quickly and sharply turn 
it downward into a course of ruin. But be that 
as it may, in every life there are epochs. We 
may, perhaps, on reaching years of reflection, 
look back and see epochs in our younger days, 
places where a former stage was definitely aban- 
doned, another definitely entered upon. Or, per- 
haps not so definitely, but more gradually, and 
yet quite as certainly. The even tenor of our 
way is, indeed, at no period so steadily and un- 
disturbedly maintained as an outside looker-on 
might think ; within, as we all could testify of 
ourselves, are turns, conflicts, upheavals, enlarge- 
ments of view and purpose, changes of feeling, — 
movements, transitions, in a word, epochs. Ke- 
main as we are, we cannot, if we would. 

9 



130 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

"Within/' we say; but obviously, also with- 
out. The child is for several years at home, 
with his parents, with his playmates, — his sole 
occupation now, to grow, like a fair young plant, 
" in sun and shower ; " yet even there, in life's 
early morning, there is something of routine and 
discipline. The course of days, and the different 
parts of the day, with what belongs to each in 
turn — it is all more or less clearlv defined in his 
child-mind. That is his world ; in that he lives, 
and as yet in no other. But he is now five, six, 
seven years old ; he is sent to school. He enters 
a new world. The routine is in most respects 
the same ; the day remains divided as before ; 
but more is put into a day. The new world is a 
larger world. The boy is part now of a larger 
order; he has things to do which rest on him 
with a new sense of responsibility; he learns 
facts and truths which reveal a realm that a few 
months since had no existence for him, and he 
has new things to think about and to dream of, 
new things to desire. It is an epoch passed ; he 
has risen into an intenser life. And mark this : 
when he has fairly come into that life, although 
it may not be altogether free from what is dis- 
tasteful to him, he has as natural a feeling in it 
as a short time ago he had in his world of toys 
and of Mother Goose. 

This is but a single example of what life means, 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 131 

from beginning to end. Out of the school into 
the workshop, the office, the training for a pro- 
fession ; that is to say, again, into a larger and 
more serious life, and therefore a truer and more 
noble, from which no manly youth could return 
to his former habits and occupations without 
doing violence to what is best in him. And 
then, coming out into the world, entering the 
struggle, shifting for one's self, held accountable, 
perhaps, for a family ; the sort of responsibility 
that comes with manhood, what we might call 
the final pushing out of the craft upon the open 
sea; this itself is a new life indeed, and how 
much larger ! and because a larger, a truer, and 
a better ; and no one worthy of the name of man 
would prefer to leave it, hardships and all, to 
return to the former, more easy and less re- 
sponsible. 

Now in all these we have instances of a sort 
of moral resurrection. Before one enters on such 
a new stage he is, to the reality of the things in 
that new life, as it were " asleep,'' — as it were 
" dead." For some of the most constant factors 
and experiences in it are to him, as yet, as if they 
were not. And if that is true of the more out- 
ward course of these lives of ours, how much 
more of their inner, their inmost ! 

Some of us recall epochs in our religious life. 
There was a time, earliest of all, of little prayers 



132 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

learned, mere words and forms, because we could 
not then have understood, had they been ex- 
plained. Questions arose, were asked, were an- 
swered as best they could be ; and we learned 
the meaning of some things in our prayers, and 
somewhat the meaning of Him to whom, unseen, 
these prayers were spoken. Perhaps after that, 
coming away from a mother's leadings, we fell 
under more direct, explicit teaching, and learned 
new truths regarding God, His will, His works, 
His administration of the world. Still further 
on we arrived at a point where the personal ques- 
tion confronted us individually: how shall we 
set ourselves in a right relation, outwardly as 
well as within, toward Almighty God, His peo- 
ple. His Church? And we took the step, one 
memorable day, the first and necessary step to 
that great end. But still on we went ; our views 
of that relation of God to us-ward and of our- 
selves to Him underwent a change, — it grew 
larger, more real, sweeter, — and yet we are 
going on; this world of Divine relations in 
which we live, and which we sometimes call the 
"kingdom of God," it stretches out farther and 
farther on every hand, its horizon is boundless, 
there is nothing with which it has not to do ; 
it is a most real world, a most intensely living 
world. Gazing around us now upon this great 
world, this large life so full of God, we could 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 133 

almost say that till we lived in the thoughts and 
purposes and pursuits in which we now live, we 
slept, yea, we were dead. Thus by successive 
epochs have we been brought into newer and 
larger worlds, worlds full of things of which, 
in previous stages, we had no thought or con- 
ception at all. 

And, if we are able sincerely to give any such 
account of progress in our inner life, — thanking 
God for it, even while we humbly confess how 
far we yet fall short, how ofttimes we have 
failed to walk by that which we had attained, — 
can we not also bear joyous witness to another 
fact ; can we not truthfully say that " Christ 
hath shined upon us " ? Nor can we conceive 
it to be possible for any man to pass through 
a moral resurrection, and take life more seriously, 
entering into larger and more absorbing relations 
with humanity and with God, without the illumi- 
nation of heavenly light falling upon his pathway 
and flooding his atmosphere ! Could it be other- 
wise, except perhaps temporarily, momentarily, 
— could it be otherwise, and God remain God ? 
Here is the secret of that joy, to the world so 
unreasonable and so unaccountable, which makes 
its possessors rejoice in tribulation and distress. 
Life in its Divine largeness is to them so radiant 
that all the accumulation of earth^s woes is too 
small to hide the heavenly beauty. 



134 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

Take the case of the very man from whose pen 
came the words of our text. Saul of Tarsus was 
a youth with most promising opportunities, with 
good friends of high standing, whose influence 
would go far to secure him a bright future, a 
brilliant career. You know his story. His epoch 
of epochs was on the Damascus road. The sum- 
mons came ; he heeded it. He chose the new life, 
the larger life, and took it with all it involved, 
thoroughly in earnest, withholding nothing. It 
happened to mean to him persecutions, buffetings, 
stripes, hungerings, vigils, imprisonments, ship- 
wreck, — at last the executioner's sword ; it meant, 
while his body was dragged through these things, 
that his sensibilities should be oftentimes even 
more keenly wounded, his heart burdened and 
sore with anxiety for the churches. How think 
you he would have answered the man that had 
asked, " Paul, was not that a mistake on your 
part when you threw aside the opportunities that 
were yours in youth, to make yourself the spokes- 
man of an unpopular cause ? " He would have 
answered, with perhaps even greater vehemence 
than when he wrote to the Philippians, ^^For 
Christ Jesus my Lord I suffered the loss of all, 
things, and do count them but dung, that I may 
know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and 
the fellowship of His sufferings, becoming con- 
formed unto His death ! '' .And if one should 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 135 

still ask, *^ Did he choose wisely ? " we can only 
make reply, that all depends upon the concep- 
tion you have formed of the purpose of life ; but 
if the effectiveness of life, in beneficent achieve- 
ment for humanity, be a supremely manly aim, 
Saint Paul chose aright, and the result justifies 
him. The thing, however, which concerns us 
here and now is this : that having heeded the 
summons, while as yet the result of his toil and 
sacrifice could not be in evidence, God granted 
him the radiance of a heavenly Presence which 
no earthly storm or darkness could put by ; 
'' Christ shined upon him,'' giving him the sup- 
port of a constant, unfailing joy ! 

And is there anything that men need more than 
this ? How much the blame for unhappiness and 
failure is cast upon the outward circumstances of 
life. If but one or other obstacle could be re- 
moved, if but this or that thing could be changed, 
how all would go well ! Some " do not get the 
help they should in their own home ; " some are 
^^ burdened with poor health;" some are "ham- 
pered by dependent and shiftless or vicious con- 
nections ; " some are " in callings in which there 
is no chance for one to be honest and make a 
living ; '' some are '' in an atmosphere of godless- 
ness, where to remain pure and religious is impos- 
sible ; '' some " did not have the advantages they 
ought when younger, and now it is too late ; " 



136 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

some are " so situated they cannot live up to their 
own better aims ; '^ some are " so driven with busi- 
ness they cannot care properly for their spiritual 
interests ; " some are " so absorbed in the round 
of social duties they cannot find time to consider 
the obligations of a larger humanity/^ — -so runs 
the endlessly varied yet monotonous arraignment 
of circumstances which predestine their unfor- 
tunate victims, it is believed, to unhappiness and 
defeat. Sometimes the thing is spoken out, 
oftener it is confessed only to the secret self, 
and suggested perhaps by the tell-tale coun- 
tenance, hungry and dissatisfied ; but withal, the 
question still is. Who will brighten life for us ? 
How may the joy Avhich is more than pleasures, 
more than successes, more than wealth, which is 
mightier than troubles, disappointments, want, — 
how may the joy which can subsist in every en- 
vironment be attained ? Or is there none ; is 
it all a delusion ? 

Many have said so in the bitterness of their 
hearts. Far be it from us to make light of any 
human woe, or to seek with cheap words to brush 
away the tremendous reality of the things that 
are against us. And yet we must bear our wit> 
ness ! We should be untrue to the glorious record 
of heroic souls in every age from the beginning ; 
untrue to the noble company of faithful men and 
women facing, all about us, difficulties surely not 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 137 

less than yours, and achieving victory for both 
righteousness and joy ; untrue even to what we 
ourselves have known of Divine uplift over the 
roughness of painful ways and the seeming in- 
superableness of barriers and obstacles, — untrue 
if we did not make haste to say, The things that 
be against us are not too mighty to be overcome ! 
If our eyes could but be opened to see the whole 
scene, we should behold, as did Elisha's servant, 
the forces of the Almighty, greater than our com- 
bined enemies, ready to our help in the struggle. 
Truly, the thing we most need is the vision ! 

Fancy yourself standing at night upon that 
favorite spot from which you love to view the 
country round. Look about you, — ^darkness on 
every side, with nothing distinguishable but some 
dim outlines of deeper blackness. Clouds cover 
the sky, neither moon nor stars are visible ; noth- 
ing of cheer but the scattered lights in distant 
windows, beckoning you to leave this gloom. 
Suppose there were with you some stranger to 
these parts, who should say, ^'A most dismal, 
dreary, monotonous country this, without a touch 
of variety or beauty to relieve it ! ^^ Would you 
not say : "Withhold your judgment, good friend, 
till you have seen it " ? You would ask him to 
return when the night was gone, and the sun in 
the heavens, to look once more. There, spread 
out with almost the grandeur of ocean, but softer 



138 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

and not so stern, lies the great lake, a deeper 
blue than the sky above it, fresh, sparkling, with 
here and there its white-caps, and an occasional 
sail filling with the wind. Let the eye run along 
the great reach of waters to where, many miles 
distant, the wooded points enclose a charming 
bay ; and now, turn and follow the sweep of 
woods, and hills, with dark lines of intervening 
valleys and ravines, hills upon hills ; and on the 
topmost against the sky, solid forest or great 
single trees in striking loneliness, as if standing 
guard. And nearer, on the right hand and on the 
left of the winding road, lie fields and meadows, 
vineyards bursting out with warm pink buds and 
soft, uncurling leaves upon their ruddy wood, 
farm houses, and the distant village with its spires. 
And while you are looking, you hear a sweet note, 
and you turn to see a flash of blue, lost a moment 
and again a moment seen, — truly a most dismal, 
dreary, monotonous country ! Is there not variety 
and beauty enough now ? And if you should 
come again, adding the hearty midsummer view, 
and later the rich and deep autumnal coloring ; if 
you should see it all upon a hazy day, upon a 
rainy day, or in winter, with the etching-like dis- 
tinctness of every line ; would you not begin to 
find it interesting ? There is enough in the 
place ; all it ivants is to be seen ; let the light 
shine upon -it, and then open your eyes! 



AN EASTER SUMMONS. 139 

Is it not even so with our lives ? There is 

enough in them, — or can be, easily can be ; only 

let the light shine upon them ! The charm will 

not come, the glory and the joy, by removing this 

or the other painful or disagreeable incident, but 

by bathing it all in that heavenly radiance. Do 

not permit yourself to deny the glory of the day 

because thus far you have lived in darkness 

yourself. 

" Awake, thou that sleepest, 
And arise from the dead, 
And Christ shall shine upon thee ! " 

Whether "Christian'^ or not, you are asleep just 
so far as your soul is not aroused to the noblest 
and highest interests of life, — just so far as you 
indolently, drowsily, let those higher claims call 
to you in vain. You are dead, whether " Chris- 
tian " or not, just so far as your soul does not 
live in those things which are above, where 
Christ is. If your time and strength, your 
thoughts and affections, have been absorbed in 
pursuing the gratification of the lower man, in 
the traflB.c and hollow pleasure of earth, it mat- 
ters little whether you are numbered among 
'' Christians '^ or not, you are, in the heart of you, 
more asleep than awake, more dead than alive ; 
and you need this Easter summons, you need a 
great resurrection, entered on with all the might 
of undivided self -committal, of earnest resolution 



140 AN EASTER SUMMONS. 

and devout prayer ; you need for your life the 
same purpose and aim and outlook which Saint 
Paul had in his. Drowse on no longer ; live 
no more this empty death-in-life, — come forth ! 
From this day let your existence mean more for 
God, for your fellow-man, and for yourself. Live 
the life that is real ; and in the joy of that life 
Christ shall indeed shine upon you. 



X. 



Wherefore He saith, — 

"When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, 
And gave gifts unto men." 
(Now this, "He ascended," what is it but that He also de- 
scended into the lower parts of the earth? He that de- 
scended is the same also that ascended far above all the 
heavens, that He might fill all things.) — Ephesians iv. 
8-10. 



OUE ASCENDED LORD. 

AS Easter is the decisive victory of our Lord 
over him that had the power of death, so 
Ascension may be taken as the Triumph cele- 
brating His victory and the end of His conflict. 

" Lift up your heads, ye gates ; 
And be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors ; 
And the King of glory shall come in. 
Who is this King of glory 1 
The Lord strong and mighty, 
The Lord mighty in battle ! " 

The battle-field at the close of the fight is not the 
fittest place or time to celebrate. The cruel work 
is yet too fresh, the thoughts are not yet calm, 
the meaning of it all is not yet clear ; there are 
wounds to dress, the forces are all to be brought 
together and their present condition to be thor- 
oughly ascertained ; and to make an occasion of 
celebration all it should be, there is needed the 
festive array, and the gathering of glad specta- 
tors, — the friends whom the victory has bene- 
fited, has saved. 

It is, of course, possible to carry analogy too 
far ; yet some such meaning we believe we may 



144 OUR ASCENDED LORD. 

see in that last of a succession of visible appear- 
ances of the risen Christ to His disciples, when, 
after once more setting forth all the meaning of 
His person, His work. His sacrifice. His victory, 
giving them His authoritative commission unto 
all nations, declaring His power in heaven and 
earth, He was taken up, and a cloud received 
Him out of their sight. And thus, if it were 
only to cheer and strengthen us in the fight in 
which we are still engaged, if only to renew our 
confidence in the Victor, who shall lead us to vic- 
tory too, it would be of great profit to us to as- 
semble during one brief hour upon every Ascen- 
sion ' Day to get, if I might say so, new fighting 
courage for the life-long warfare. 

But there are other lessons to be learned, more 
precious and more needful still. Jesus Christ 
brought God down to men ; that is the Incarna- 
tion. But He also lifted men up to God ; that is 
the Ascension. In Him Divinity entered earth ; 
but in Him also humanity entered heaven. He 
that came down to men is the same that has gone 
up to God, — both in Himself, '^ Mediator be- 
tween God and man. Himself the Man Christ 
Jesus.'' Came down ; went up, — not stood mid- 
way, neither coming nor going, as abstract dogma 
often leaves Him. I^ote also, in passing, that a 
mediator perfectly such involves the fullest par- 
ticipation in both positions. By being perfectly 



OUR ASCENDED LORD. 145 

Divine, and coming down and becoming perfectly 
human, and returning in triumphant humanity to 
heaven, so is He truly become our Mediator. 

"He that descended is the same also that 
ascended." Think what that means. Descended 
to the human life ; descended to poverty and 
drudgery ; descended to the limitations and 
deprivations of an humble home in an obscure 
village; descended to temptation by the Evil 
One, and to painful contact with the wickedness 
of sin; descended to controversy with bigotry, 
and {persecution by the religious leaders of the 
day ; descended to being an outcast from " soci- 
ety " and to rejection by the masses ; descended 
to betrayal by His friend, to insults by a brutal 
soldiery, to fiendish torture, and an ignominious, 
excruciating death ; descended even to the realm 
of departed spirits, — into the underworld, " the 
lower parts of the earth," — came He not far 
enough down ? Blessed Descension for men ! — 
for He came down to where anybody could ap- 
proach Him. Poor people, sick people, little chil- 
dren, people in all sorts of trouble, bad people, the 
most miserable woman of the streets whom no 
one else would touch, — they could all come to 
Him and take His time and strength. Nobody 
needed to be afraid of Him ; nobody was afraid 
of Him. Sometimes the disciples would warn 

10 



146 OUR ASCENDED LORD. 

people off; Jesus never. ^^And He that de- 
scended is the same that ascended." 

Consider what that means, or ought to mean, 
to us. It means that what He was here He is 
there ; that what men could ask of Him here 
they can ask of Him there. 

Do you remember that charming story of 
^^ Little Lord Fauntleroy " ? How the little boy 
went across the sea, to a strange country, there 
to be an earl, and come into possession of wealth 
and honors, all so different from what he had 
known here ? And when he had gone, his 
friend, Mr. Hobbs, used to sit and look at the 
place where the little boy had sat in his store, 
and think how strange and wonderful it was 
that one who was so great now should really 
have been with him here on those familiar terms. 
And somehow, being an earl, and belonging to 
the aristocracy, seemed quite different to Mr. 
Hobbs now that he had a friend there ; he no 
longer felt so far removed from it. He wanted 
to know more about it, and to understand what 
sort of life an earl led, and so to keep near his 
little friend in his thoughts, and, in a sense, to 
live with Fauntleroy, — to live in spirit in an 
English caLstle, while his body was still in the 
humble shop. But the beautiful part of it was 
that Eauntleroy was the same there that he had 
been here. He was just as generous and un- 



OUR ASCENDED LORD. 147 

selfish ; tie did not forget his friends whom the 
world regarded as so far below him ; he was 
never ashamed of them, and was just as ready to 
serve them as he had ever been. When he had 
been poor himself he had given them the best he 
had ; and now that he was rich and powerful he 
still gave them his best, — the same in the castle 
that he had been in the grocer's shop ! 

May not this story, as a little parable, teach us 
in a humble way of Him who descended, the 
same also that ascended ? " Having then a great 
High Priest, who hath passed through the heav- 
ens, Jesus, the Son of God — one that hath been 
in all points tempted like as we are, yet without 
sin. — let us therefore draw near with boldness 
unto the throne of grace, that we may receive 
mercy, and may find grace to help us in time 
of need." 

Look at it again. ^^ Now this, ^He ascended,' 
what is it but that He also descended into the 
lower parts of the earth ? " Does it mean. He 
could not have been exalted if He had not first 
stooped down in such humility, and been beneath 
all, and servant of all ? That is precisely what 
it means. 

For His ascension is by law. There is nothing 
magical, nothing arbitrary in it. ^^ Behoved it 
not the Christ to suffer these things and to enter 
into His glory?" Yes, you say, because God 



148 OUR ASCENDED LORD. 

had so ordained it. I reply that God ordained 
it so because so it was right ; and we cannot 
conceive of God as a Moral Being and ordaining 
anything different. It is the Devil who offers 
all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for a 
single act of homage ; God can give glory only 
after glory is righteously due, thrones and king- 
doms after they are earned. And the law to 
which we see Christ subject is the law to which 
we ourselves are subject ; that we may know 
what it is to live up fully to the law under which 
we live, He descends to us and lives under it, 
and lives fully up to it Himself. 

For consider. Does not the very word trmmph 
imply victory? Does not the very word victory 
again imply conflict ? Is that a glorious triumph 
which celebrates an easy victory ? Can a cheap 
prize be a great prize ? If the thing has cost 
nothing, if into the struggle have entered no 
hazards of life and limb, no wounds and pains, 
no desperate and almost superhuman exertions, 
what is it you are celebrating ? Saint Paul, at 
any rate, made no such mistake as we are daily 
guilty of. From the day that the Ascended 
Lord appeared to him and chose him to the 
blessed service, he held himself to the conditions 
of true discipleship, which are the conditions, 
and the only conditions, of the Christian's final 
triumph. Not otherwise than the Master Him- 



OUR ASCENDED LORD. 149 

self did he expect to enter the everlasting doors. 
The same who bade his youthful fellow-worker 
^^ fight the good fight/' "endure hardship as a 
good soldier of Jesus Christ/' could at the close 
of life say of himself, "I have fought the good 
fight, I have finished the course, I have kept 
the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me 
the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the 
righteous Judge, shall give to me at that day." 
And, as if again to repeat and to emphasize that 
in this he is not singular, that the same fight, and 
the same course, and the same crown are for all, 
upon the self-same conditions, he adds, '^ And not 
only to me, but also to all them that have loved 
His appearing." 

No, there is nothing magical, nothing arbi- 
trary in any of the Divine operations, in any 
of the awards bestowed by the hand of God. 
There is a righteous order by which, as God is 
God, all these things come in their right time 
and place. This Ascension, which to-day we 
celebrate, could have come to none other than 
Jesus ; because none other than Jesus right- 
eously achieved it. Let us add, it could not 
come to Jesus Himself until He had achieved it. 

H you could conceive of Jesus' yielding to the 
Tempter in the desert ; or afterward, to the pop- 
ular solicitation to head a temporal movement; 
or after that, to the pleadings of His family to 



150 OUR ASCENDED LORD. 

retire to His h6me and withdraw from so dan- 
gerous a course ; or later, in the agony of the 
garden, omitting His " Thy will be done " and re- 
fusing the cup ; or upon the very last day, up the 
steep of Calvary, crying out, " I cannot," and re- 
tracting His claims, to save His life, — if, I say, 
you could conceive of Jesus^ yielding up His cause, 
sacrificing His fidelity at any one of these points, 
or even at some less vital moment and in some 
less important thing breaking down and proving 
untrue, all would have been defeated, and His 
Name would never have become that " only Name 
under heaven ^' of which Saint Peter testified, that 
Name which God exalted above every other for 
universal adoration. 

And the Son of Man Himself taught us that the 
disciple is not above his Master, nor the servant 
above his Lord. What right have we to change 
that ? What right, for the sake of a mawkish 
humility, or of a barren notion of Divine grace, to 
^^ leave it all to Him," when He bids us take up 
our cross and follow Him ? We have too much 
flattered ourselves with sweet phrases and fond 
conceits, trusting that somehow the everlasting 
doors that swung open to Him only after the most 
desperate fight was finished, will swing open to 
us at the mere mention of His Name. Ah ! not so. 
For what is He Captain but to lead us into battle ; 
for what is He Victor, but that He might put into 



OUR ASCENDED LORD. 151 

our hands the trusty weapon and show us how to 
wield it ; for what did He endure, but that He 
might teach and impart to us of His own endur- 
ance ; in a word, for what did He fight and after- 
ward truly ascend, but that He might bring us to 
glory on the like glorious terms ? 

Yes, ^-this ^He ascended,' what is it but that 
He also descended into the lower parts of the 
earth ? He that descended is the same also that 
ascended far above all heavens." You cannot 
have one without the other. God's law is fixed ; 
as far as you are willing to descend, so far will He 
make you rise. We all are eager to rise ; we 
wonder and murmur because we do not. But the 
reason could not be plainer. We cannot ascend 
except we have first descended ; and we are not 
willing to descend. We give small, grudging 
sacrifices ; we get small satisfactions out of them. 
We empty a little of self out of our lives, and 
admit a little of God's Spirit into them, but oh, 
how little ! We intermit our efforts, we deviate 
from the right course, we leave off fighting and 
let the adversary have his way, — and all the 
time we comfort ourselves with the reflection 
that we are on the road to heaven! There is 
a verse in Scripture about being ^^ saved so 
as by fire," with all one's life-building lying in 
ashes on the ground, and nothing to show for 
all the years of earthly opportunity ; but that is 



152 OUR ASCENDED LORD. 

hardly Saint Paul's conception of going home to 
glory ! 

Jesus was exalted to the right hand of God, 
when He had suffered the worst that earth could 
do ; when He had emptied Himself fully, given 
Himself utterly for His brethren. When you 
and I do the same we can be where He is. You 
think there is only one place at the right hand of 
God ? What, then, is the right hand of God ? Is 
it in far off space, a throne beside the great white 
throne of God Himself ? If that were what it 
meant, what would become of the closing words 
of our text, in which the apostle tells us that 
" He ascended far above all heavens, that He 
might fill all things '' ? No, if the heaven of 
heavens cannot contain the Almighty, neither can 
they circumscribe the place at His right hand. 
God^s right hand is God^s glorious acting Power ; 
and to be there is indeed to be in the way of 
filling all things. To be at His right hand is to 
be in the thick of every battle, with victory 
pledged ; to be in the midst of every good work, 
with success assured ; it is to have God^s power, 
and to use it, everywhere. 

And how we all crave real power ! We want 
our plans to issue in actions ; we would have our 
words move men ; we would be of the forces that 
shape life and conduct. Now we may have 
power — God's own power — and use it with 



OUR ASCRNDED LORD. 153 

telling effect every day ; we, too, may be at God's 
right hand ; but we must be willing to pay the 
price. "The lower part of the earth/^ "far 
above all heavens;'' "emptied of self/^ "filled 
with all the fulness of God ; " " made of no repu- 
tation," "having the Name that is above every 
name : " — this is the law of the kingdom, which 
our Lord fulfilled, and now would teach us, His 
disciples. This is the way of His cross, in which 
sign alone we conquer. 

And if it seem a strange thing that we should 
speak of our ascending to God's right hand now^ 
remember that this is precisely what Saint Paul 
himself bids us do. Indeed, unless we do so 
ascend now, we cannot, in the more glorious and 
final manner, ascend hereafter. 

" God, the King of glory, who hast exalted 
Thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph, 
we beseech Thee, leave us not comfortless ; but 
send to us Thy Holy Ghost to comfort us, and 
exalt us unto the same ,place whither our Saviour 
Christ has gone before ; who liveth and reigneth 
with Thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world 
without end. Amen." 



XI. 
€^t ^pvcit of ^cntecojft. 



Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and 
having received of the Father the promise of the Holy 
Ghost, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear. 
— Acts ii. 33. 



XL 

THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

THE Day of Pentecost is fully come. Its 
great event, which transformed the Jewish 
Feast of Weeks into a crowning feast of the 
Christian Year, marks the highest summit of 
the achievement of our Lord. We have followed 
His history from birth to manhood, through the 
public ministry with its experience of the world's 
bitter unreasoning opposition, through Gethsem- 
ane and the brutal scenes of the sham trial, even 
to that lowest depth of the crucifixion between 
two malefactors ; we have mourned with the scat- 
tered disciples 5 we have been gladdened at the 
triumph over death on the first day of the week ; 
we have, with the eleven, caught glimpses of the 
familiar Friend, — whose familiarity, however, is 
now changed into something not less benevolent, 
but strangely exalted, so that sometimes He seems 
the same Jesus, and again appears as One out of 
another world ; we have, moreover, stood gazing 
after the ascended Lord, rejoicing that, enthroned 
in glory. He is the same sympathizing Friend and 
Brother still; and, now that all this has once 



/ 



158 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

more passed in review before us^ the single pic- 
ture left upon our minds is of The Man Christ 
Jesus, with all that went to make up a perfect 
humanity, dwelling in light and blessedness 
evermore. 

True as the picture is we need to remember 
that it does not exhibit the whole truth of our 
Lord's life. The apostle Paul indicates to us 
that there is something still beyond : " Even 
though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet 
now we know Him so no more.'' There is yet one 
step further for us to follow our Lord's career, 
strange as it may seem to say it, after the As- 
cension scene, — one step without which the work 
had been left incomplete, without which the king- 
dom of God could never triumph in the earth. 
There are, to be sure, those who would rest the 
work of Christianity on the influence of the ex- 
ample of the Perfect Man, — who would know 
Him only after the flesh, who would perpetuate 
a Christ without a Pentecost, and would simply 
by the beauty of that self-denying life and 
martyr-death win others to copy after Him ; but 
Christ Himself is against them. Throughout the 
tender and solemn discourse of the evening be- 
fore His death His thought leads the sorrowing 
disciples on to the expectation of comfort and 
guidance and power in an abiding Presence, 
which shall follow His departure. He carries 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 159 

forward the work begun at Bethlehem and con- 
tinued even to Calvary until its completion on 
the Day of Pentecost. He does not rest content 
with deliverance from earthly griefs and ills and 
triumph over earthly and infernal foes ; no, not 
till, "being by the right hand of God exalted, 
and having received of the Father the promise of 
the Holy Ghost, He hath poured forth this which 
ye see and hear." 

Consider the glory of that day. Hitherto fugi- 
tive from their persecutors, locked perhaps (as 
we know they were on one occasion) within the 
room for fear of the Jews ; not one of them, with 
the possible exception of Saint John, but had fled 
from the Lord at the critical hour ; a small band 
with nothing in themselves to give confidence, 
and the visible presence of the Master forever 
withdrawn, — so the eventful morning finds 
them. While they are there, "all together in 
one place, . . . suddenly there came from heaven 
a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and 
it filled all the house where they were sitting. 
And there appeared unto them tongues parting 
asunder, like as of fire, and it sat upon each one 
of them. And they were all filled with the Holy 
Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as 
the Spirit gave them utterance." The time was 
opportune. Power from above is given these wit- 
nesses just when they can bear their testimony 



I 

/ 



160 THE SPIRIT or PENTECOST. 

before representatives of the entire known world. 
'' Men from every nation under heaven " throng 
the place, and are amazed at what they see and 
hear. The sneers of a few incredulous and hos- 
tile are easily refuted. And it is no slight proof 
of the Divine source of this inspiration that un- 
der it the Apostle Peter, with every faculty under 
perfect control and all his powers at his com- 
mand, stands up and pours forth no ranting, in- 
coherent exhortation, but a clear, convincing, 
masterly discourse, reaching the hearts and con- 
sciences of the multitude before him. He holds 
up Jesus as the Messiah of their nation and the 
Lord of all men, — this same Jesus whom the 
Jews had wickedly slain. One finds it hard to 
recognize in him the same man that had, less 
than two months before, thrice denied his Lord. 
But this is now the day of new things ; forever 
and decisively " old things are passed away ; ^^ it 
is the day of triumph, as of the Master so also of 
the disciple. On this same day there are three 
thousand asking to be baptized into, the name 
of Christ; and the little band of disciples now 
swelled into an aggressive army is sealed as the 
Church, imperishable, invincible. 

Let us seek to understand these things, if in 
a measure we may. Put with the words of our 
text the declarations of Christ Himself in His 
last discourse. One object of the mission of the 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 161 

Comfoxter is " that He may be with the disciples 
forever/' — ^^that they may not be left orphans/' 
as Jesus so tenderly expressed it ; another is 
" that He may teach them all things/' or^ in an- 
other form, ^^that He may lead them into all 
truth ; " another still is " that He may testify of 
Christ," and ^^may convict the world in respect 
of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." 
Take also some of the statements in the Epistles, 
— for example, where Saint Paul calls the Holy 
Spirit ^' the Spirit of Jesus Christ," and again, 
"Now, the Lord is the Spirit," and in various 
places speaks of the Holy Spirit indwelling in 
the believer and in the whole body of the faith- 
ful, the Church. Saint Peter also speaks of the 
" Spirit of Christ ; " and Saint John, in his Gos- 
pel narrative, tells us that in Jesus' lifetime " the 
Spirit was not yet [given] because Jesus was not 
yet glorified." We adduce all these Scriptures in 
order that we may arrive at some clearer view of 
what this coming of the Holy Spirit means, — 
that we may come out of the vagueness and con- 
fusion which surround this part of our Christian 
faith more than perhaps any other, and that the 
Spirit of Pentecost may be more real to us in 
our daily life. What, then, do we learn from 
them ? 

First, that Pentecost could come only after the 

life and death and resurrection and ascension of 

11 



162 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

Jesus. All these events must necessarily precede 
the great visitation we celebrate to-day. 

This truth is, perhaps, not perfectly obvious. 
Our Lord's own word was, '' If I go not away, the 
Comforter will not come unto you." Why not ? 
Because before His death there could be no Wit- 
ness of the Christ ; the Christ had not yet become 
fully the Christ our Saviour. Such He was ap- 
proved through His death and resurrection ; for 
^4t behooved the Christ to suffer these things 
and to enter into His glory ; '' because, we may 
say further, the Spirit was to convict the world 
of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; and 
this conviction must be wrought by reference at 
every point to Christ, the world's Holy One and 
Saviour from sin, the world's perfect God- 
approved Model of righteousness, the world's 
appointed Judge. 

Or, to state the same truths in still simpler 
form : the whole career of Jesus embraces not a 
single arbitrary feature ; there is an organic and 
necessary connection of each several part with 
the whole, so that we cannot conceive of any- 
thing in it being shifted out of its place without 
displacing all that follows. Once for all let us 
rid ourselves of the thought of an arbitrary 
God, who gives or withholds, prevents or brings 
to pass, without reason, by pure fiat. Such a 
conception is daily working great havoc in the 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 163 

practical lives of men and women, and ob- 
scuring some of the most blessed facts of the 
Gospel, throwing around them an air of unreal- 
ity. Each following step dependent on that 
which went before, — this was the law of the 
Saviour's life, as it is the law of every life, since 
God is God. 

The second lesson we would seek to under- 
stand from these Scriptures is that Jesus " re- 
ceived of the Father the promise of the Holy 
Ghost." How may we interpret this to our 
thought ? 

We might, of course, look for chapter and verse 
where such a promise is recorded, and having 
found it, might suppose we had answered the 
whole question. Perhaps with Saint Peter and 
his hearers the mere reference to prophecy suf- 
ficed. We venture to suggest that to-day some- 
thing more is needed. Men will ask. Why the 
promise ? what is its significance ? what neces- 
sary relation is there between what Jesus was 
and did and such a promise of the Holy 
Ghost? 

Now, we think there are hints to furnish us at 
least some helpful suggestions in the way of an- 
swers to these questions. Let us look more 
closely at the subject. 

Our Lord had, in His farewell discourse, told 
His disciples that He would make request of the 



164 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

Father, who should give them another "Com- 
forter." Note the Apostle's striking language 
in our text, — '' having received . . . He hath 
poured forth.'' The figure is of the Father giv- 
ing the gift to Christ, and of Christ in turn giving 
it in all its abundance to the disciples. To be 
sure, this is only a figure ; but the truth so pic- 
tured must be not less real and striking than the 
figure. 

And we must bear in mind again what we have 
already urged, that Pentecost could not come till 
all the preceding events in Christ's career had 
been past. Then we may begin to see why in all 
the world's history no one else could be a Saviour 
to man. If what man needs to be saved from is 
sin, if sin is to be vanquished and completely 
overmastered, — sin, and not the consequence or 
penalty of sin, primarily, — then the meaning of 
the Christ's life breaks upon us with new power. 
If there is or can be any Deliverer, He must not 
Himself be under sin's dominion in any degree. 
Step by step, keeping Himself pure, standing 
blameless, meeting and repelling every tempta- 
tion, bearing every pain inflicted by the foe, 
faithful to the uttermost, sinning the while not 
even in word or thought, meeting death itself, if 
need be, and not overcome of sin even then : He 
who will do this shall be pronounced Victor over 
sin, — at least in His own Person and for Him- 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 165 

self. Is there any name on the roll of humanity, 
save One, that has earned this distinction ? 

Victor for Himself ; but how about His breth- 
ren ? If His example could encourage them to a 
like attempt, the experiment would too soon show 
them how little it was in them of their own 
strength to wage this fight. Thank God for all 
that followed Calvary ! What preceded would 
have sufficed to exalt Him forever as the Hero 
of mankind; what followed sealed Him as hu- 
manity's Saviour. For in the resurrection and 
ascension He was given back, as it were, to the 
sons of men, to lead them on in the great conflict 
to a like certain victory ; and on Pentecost began 
the mighty equipment, and the world-wide war 
which shall not cease till He hath made His 
enemies His footstool. 

How different all lesser saviours, —if in an in- 
finitely humbler sense we can use the term thus, 
— all other benefactors of man ! Take anj^ one 
among them, the noblest you can find ; in a career 
of great self-sacrifice, let us say, he has wrought 
out blessings for his fellows ; but are there not 
many points in his career where the test breaks 
down, many things in his character which are far 
from perfect, and which in other characters, again, 
are far more nobly developed ? For a random 
example take the remarkable personality of Soc- 
rates. Those who have read his memoirs written 



166 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

by Xenophon, know that with all his nobleness he 
was far from being a perfect man. In compari- 
son with such as that of Jesus his character 
breaks down at every step. So would that of 
any other of the sons of men that ever lived 
upon our earth. No perfect chain — no, not even 
one perfect link ! There is no salvation for us 
in men. 

But when Jesus, linking sinless to-days to sin- 
less yesterdays in one golden chain, had made His 
whole life perfect from Bethlehem to Calvary, the 
plain language of Scripture shows us that God se- 
cured all the rest. '^ Him God raised up ; '^ ^^ Him 
He exalted to His own right hand ; " for Him He 
gave "the promise of the Holy Ghost," — and all 
this, because ivhat Jesus now ivas, God could own 
and could perpetuate. 

Men of science tell us there is a law of " the 
survival of tlie fittest.'' Now we know that a law 
IS simply a way of God's working. And we know 
that in the moral world, the world of spirit. His 
way of working is in keeping with His own char- 
acter,^ — as Matthew. Arnold says, a Power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness ; in other 
words, by the law of God righteousness is to 
survive. 

But mankind presents at the very first glance 
a perverted, abnormal aspect. It is not b}^ fol- 
lowing out what men now are that this righteous- 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 167 

ness and perfection can be attained, for themselves 
or for the race. 

If there could be a better Type of man, if 
men could be made over into the likeness of that 
better, then God's law would favor the survival 
of that better humanity. 

And men of science also tell us of ideals in 
the evolution of man. They tell us that " in 
human evolution spirit or character is transformed 
by its own ideals." All, therefore, depends upon 
our having, not only worthy, lofty ideals, but the 
Absolute and Perfect Ideal. 

Are we not beginning to see what is meant by 
Jesus' ^^ receiving the promise of the Father?" 
Kot to an imperfect Jesus could have been given 
the power to perpetuate Himself in mankind. 
Not to an imperfect Jesus could have been given 
the final prerogative of humanity's Absolute 
Ideal. 

Now read these two verses : — 

"And I will pray the Father and He shall 
give you another ^Comforter,' that He may be 
with you forever ; " and, — 

" No longer I, but Christ liveth in me." 

Bind them together by this third : — 

" But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if 
so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But 
if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is 
none of His." 



168 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

The presence of the Holy Spirit, then, is, as we 
may say, only the continued presence of our 
Saviour Jesus Christ, now glorified, not limited 
by time or space. Jesus in the flesh could be in 
but one place at one time ; now, by the Father's 
granted promise, He can be with us all and 
evermore. 

But even this is not the first and most helpful 
aspect of the truth. Is it not to simple hearts a 
great joy to find that the Holy Ghost, so often 
named in Holy Scripture, so often regarded with 
perplexity and awe, is but the Spirit of Christ ? 
The same ineffable love, the same tender sym- 
pathy, the same affectionate concern for the wel- 
fare of every child of man, is characteristic of the 
Spirit as of that Jesus whom from the Gospels 
you know after the flesh, — nay, in all these Jesus 
was but bringing the Father's inmost Heart to 
human view, and revealing the Father's Character ; 
and thus we see how these Three, the Father, the 
Son, and the Holy Ghost, are One, God blessed 
forever ! 

And now, since Pentecost, " the Spirit of God 
lies all about the spirit of man like a mighty sea, 
ready to rush in at the smallest chink in the walls 
that shut Him out from His own ! " What more 
do we need than unfailing diligence not to hinder, 
thwart, deny room to this Spirit of grace ? No 
need for a second Pentecost. Oh, the unbelief of 



THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 169 

supposing that there is very little of God's Spirit 
present among us ! 

Yes, let us henceforth have done with these bar- 
ren^ joyless Christian lives ! Not only the honest 
effort, the sense of duty, but the fulness, the large- 
ness, the liberty, the spontaneity which lift us up, 
do we want. Surely we all have somewhat of that 
Spirit, feeling the influence of His presence in 
that little measure in which we surrender our- 
selves to Him. But let us henceforth surrender 
ourselves wholly to Him ; let our joy be full ; let 
peace richly abound, the peace of being no longer 
at cross-purposes within; let us do with great 
gladness all we do in Christ's name, — it is our 
privilege ; let us live full lives, not starved, sickly, 
half-dead, not dragging ourselves on from task to 
task with listless knees; let us surrender our- 
selves wholly to Him, that He may sanctify us 
wholly; 'tis easier to live out-and-out for God 
than to try to serve two masters ; let us surrender 
to Him the citadel of the heart, that He may 
drive away every enemy of the consecrated life ! 

And if any consideration could move us to 
make such a surrender, should it not be this, that 
He is altogether on our side ? We read of " the 
Comforter," and elsewhere of "the Advocate" 
and ^' the Paraclete ; " but why not say at once, 
" the Helper " ? The Helper — that is the precise 
force, if not the exact translation of the word. 



170 THE SPIRIT OF PENTECOST. 

The Holy Ghost our Helper; sent to be always 
near us, always ready to respond to our call, 
always prepared to take our part, always willing 
to rescue and guide, always allying His strength 
with our weakness. 

" Closer is He than breathing, 
Xearer than hands and feet/' 

Looking at it in its length and breadth, surely 
we may say that with this truth of a Spirit of 
Pentecost life becomes a very different thing; we 
may join with the Apostle in the glad exclama- 
tion : '' The old things are passed away ; behold, 
they are become new ! " 



XII. 
Contcnliing for tl)e f aitl^. 



Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write unto 
you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write 
unto you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith 
which was once for all delivered unto the saints. — Jude 3. 



XII 
CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

NO utterance, at the present moment, could 
well be more opportune. Men seem to be 
thoroughly confused as to the great matter of 
Belief : some panic-stricken and desperate, others 
threatened with chronic scepticism and ready to 
throw all positive faiths overboard. Never was 
there greater need of instruction in first prin- 
ciples; and what these are we think may be 
easily discovered by giving careful attention to 
this Scripture. The writer of our text holds the 
key to the situation. 

There are, obviously, two principal inquiries 
to be answered, if the exhortation is to have due 
weight ; and when they have been answered, and 
the answers have been well pondered, we are 
confident that very much besides will have been 
made clear : first, What is this faith which luas 
once for all delivered unto the saints ? secondly, 
How shall ive to best effect contend earnestly 
for it? 

If we would make any progress toward an 
answer of this first question, our minds must be 



174 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

cleared of notions derived from a state of things 
utterly unknown in Jude's day; we must bring 
back the plain meaning of words in his age, rid 
of all later accretions. To be sure, there is no 
startling novelty in this advice ; yet the method 
is so rarely followed by either our heated 
defenders of orthodoxy or our self-complacent 
agnostic critics, that one may be permitted, in 
the name of common-sense, to recall everybody 
to its necessity. Let us, then, carefully attend 
to the words, and we shall already be a long way 
toward a clear understanding of the whole mat- 
ter. What " faith'' is this ? The faith held by 
Jude, and by the Christian people whom Jude 
addressed; the first-century faith, not the fifth- 
century, nor the sixteenth-century. In the bare 
recollection of this one fact there is much to 
help us. But the writer characterizes it further 
as ^^once for all delivered unto the saints." 
If ^^once for all," then evidently he has never 
known any other, does not contemplate the pos- 
sibility of any other in the future. It is the 
first faith. While he states that it was " de- 
livered unto the saints," — that is, according to 
the common New Testament usage, " to the Chris- 
tians," — he omits to state by whom it was de- 
livered. He deems that unnecessary. There was 
but one company of men that had a faith to de- 
liver to the world; we agree in calling them 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 175 

Apostles. The question therefore reduces itself 
to this : Wliat^ in point of fact, did the Apostles 
bring to the ivorld as the Christian faith ? 

Saint John introduces his first Epistle with 
the statement, ^^That which we have seen and 
heard declare we unto you.'^ Evidently he re- 
garded it as testimony. He and his associates 
had been chosen to receive immediate and per- 
sonal knowledge of a Great Fact, . of which in 
due time they were to be the witnesses. There 
is lesS' than no reason to think that they were 
indoctrinated in a theology, or schooled in a 
system ; those are structures which man may 
always be depended on to rear for himself. No ; 
but by the intimacy of several years' companion- 
ship, by the interpretation of life's deeper mean- 
ings in the light of the Divine Fatherhood and 
of the true Sonship, by the unceasing marvel and 
glory of His own high purpose and unremitting 
strong devotion to His God-given work, shining 
forth through gentle and unassuming meekness ; 
and afterward by the fearful night in Gethsem- 
ane and afternoon on Golgotha, followed by the 
sorrow, the hopelessness, the restored joy, the 
new light, the exultation in powers before un- 
known, — by these experiences, all clustering 
about His own Person, Jesus prepared His cho- 
sen disciples to go into all the world speaking 
of "what they had seen and heard.*' 



176 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

Take now your New Testament, and turn to 
the Book of Acts. Kead again the account, so 
full of life and movement, of how the Apostles 
went forth, and how and what they wrought. 
Attend specially to the discourses, and note the 
form in which these first Christian preachers 
deliver their message. I know of no better way 
to satisfy ourselves at first hand of what those 
men understood to be ^'the faith." Prepared, as 
we have said, to witness of Jesus Christ, they 
did so witness, before Jews and Gentiles. They 
told their story. Varying in order and in rela- 
tive prominence of details, sometimes more em- 
phasis here, sometimes more there, yet the story 
is the same story over and over again : that Jesus 
was come into the world, the Son of God, to be 
our Lord and Saviour, that He went about doing 
good, approved in mighty works, delivered into 
the hand of Pilate and crucified by the Jews, on 
the third day raised from the dead, ascended to 
glory, blessing His disciples with the gift of His 
Spirit, offering remission of sins to all who 
would repent, believe, and be baptized in His 
Name. There was as yet no single ^^form of 
sound words," the convenience of what we might 
term a '^ portable statement ; " that was to come 
later. But it was "the faith," a plain, simple 
and single thing to accept at the Apostles' word, 
and requiring no erudition or acuteness or profun- 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 177 

dity to master ; accepted on Pentecost day by the 
three thousand who had listened to Saint Peter's 
preaching, and soon after, in city after city, in 
Europe and Africa as well as Asia. That this 
account of Jesus as the Christ should in the 
course of time be put into concise form, perhaps 
in the first instance in connection with the bap- 
tismal profession required of the candidate, was 
natural and inevitable. Thus the. Churches ob- 
tained their creeds, which, by natural assimila- 
tion, merged in a few centuries in the form of 
the so-called "Apostles' Creed." When thus 
developed, the significance of this symbol is not 
in its constituent articles as a series of theologi- 
cal propositions (as if you must take them one 
by one, accept or reject), but in its entirety as a 
current and admirable summary of " the faith " 
delivered by the Apostles. And at the present 
time, aside from the claims of its venerable 
beauty, there is a very practical fitness in re- 
hearsing this creed as a part of every divine 
service. 

As to creeds, so-called, there are many; and 
yet there is no creed hit one. There are not many 
faiths delivered ; there is "the faith once for all 
delivered ; " by which token we may satisfy our- 
selves that, so far as creeds (so-called) oppose 
each other, — negative each other, stand each 

upon the erroneousness or dangerous defectiveness 

12 



178 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

of others, finding material for assertions in their 
rivals' denials, and for denials in their rivals' 
assertions, — so far are they not statements of 
" the faith which was once for all delivered unto 
the saints." Doubtless they have their neces- 
sary place in the onward march of theological 
thought; but they are misnamed ^^ creeds." A 
doctrinal compendium is not a creed. The creed 
occupies itself with the testified fact of Jesus as 
the Christ ; not with controverted opinions, chiefly 
metaphysical. Therefore, if a man would be a 
Christian, he must accept the creed, not for the 
creed's sake, but the faith's which it plainly 
sums up. Phrase that faith in other or better 
words if you think you can do so ; as to the 
things themselves which are rehearsed, it is not 
for us to add to or to take from them ; thus was it 
from the first delivered by the witnesses. Try the 
witnesses anew if you will, — sift their testimony, 
reject it altogether if you must; but remember 
that the net result in your hands is not what the 
apostolic Church understood by the Christian 
faith. Clear and definite, single and distinct, that 
still stands challenging the world, — the same 
to-day that it was eighteen hundred years ago. 

But, such being this faith, how shall we con- 
tend earnestly for it ? 

Not chiefly by polemic and apology, the 
weapons of theological science ; for the articles 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 179 

of the faith are not less moral than histori- 
cal. Taking that faith in its germinal form, 
^^Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living 
God/' — how would one believe that and contend 
earnestly for it ? '' Flesh and blood hath not 
revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in 
heaven," was Christ's reply to His disciple's con- 
fession. To believe in Jesus was at least as much 
a matter of spiritual penetration and insight as to 
believe in a friend, a leader, a cause. It meant 
to perceive and adore the innermost Jesus ; and 
this was not for the worldling, the frivolous, the 
covetous, the hypocrite. A hundred men might 
see this Jesus go in and out among them just as 
the believing disciple did, might hear Him say 
all He had to say, look on as He wrought works 
of mercy, — some would call Him '^ a gluttonous 
man and a wine-bibber, friend of publicans and 
sinners ; " others, " the carpenter, the son of 
Mary, — whence hath he these things ? " others, 
^^ Elijah," or ^^ one of the prophets." But, in the 
face of all that, Simon Peter, with that God-given 
insight, beheld the glory of Jesus' strength and 
purity and love, was convinced that He was right, 
and that if the whole world differed from Him 
the whole world was wrong, — evidently a state 
of mind far in advance of the mere recognition 
of Jesus as the Messiah of the prophets, proven 
to his Hebrew intellect. 



180 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

And you and I repeat Saint Peter's words, con- 
fessing that we believe in Jesus as the Christ. 
Do we truly so believe ? Do we believe in Him 
so much that we should follow in His way against 
the dissuasions of the world, to our own tem- 
poral loss ? Or, if He were to appear among us 
to-day in guise corresponding to that of the Naza- 
rene carpenter of old, should we then believe that 
to none other could we go, — He had the words 
of eternal life ? Searching question for us all ! 
But in Jesus Christ we say we do believe. Do 
we, then ? ^^ Lord, I believe ; help Thou mine 
unbelief." 

Suppose, then, the beginning of a true believ- 
ing is in us, though it were but as a grain of 
mustard seed, how shall we contend earnestly for 
it ? By being on our guard that no man take it 
from us ; by entering into its inner meaning more 
and more; by endeavoring to see all things in 
Jesus' light; by binding our affections and as- 
pirations into one with that principle which made 
Jesus' life single, — the principle of being ever 
about our Father's business ; by living our 
whole lives thereby, repulsing temptation and 
opposition, and sacrificing no part of it to any 
encroaching power. 

How admirably is this truth further illustrated 
when we consider some of the controverted par- 
ticulars in the apostolic account of Jesus ; for we 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 181 

find in that account, and therefore in the creed, 
what we variously call the " miraculous," the 
" supernatural," — expressions which are bung- 
ling and unsatisfactory, and yet difficult to super- 
sede, if indeed one had any better to suggest. 
What shall we do with them ? They are not 
merely secondary or incidental matters, not to 
be quietly dropped as non-essentials. A great 
field here opens to view. '^ Contend earnestly 
for the faith " ? " Prove the New Testament 
books historically trustworthy ; show the im- 
portant and vital relation of this miraculous 
element to the narrative as a whole ; vindicate it 
further by exhibiting its reasonableness, its ante- 
cedent probability, its sober and lofty tone," — 
thus will the theological disputant begin to point 
us to a plan of campaign. Well, when it is all 
accomplished, what have we attained ? We have 
enriched our minds by adding to our store of 
information certain biographical data concern- 
ing Jesus. Was it for this the Apostles bore 
witness ? Not at all. 

One and all they said, '^ Repent,'^^ — ^^ amend 
your lives ; " " change your life-purpose." What 
had that to do with believing their testimony ? 
Everything. The testimony had from the first 
this one thing in view, that they who should be- 
lieve in Jesus as the Christ were to bring their 
life-purpose into line with the life-purpose of the 



182 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

Christ. How powerfully this is unfolded when 
Saint Paul comes upon the scene. Could any one 
more strenuously insist upon the historical fact 
that Christ actually rose from the dead on the 
third day ? How he asserts and defends it in 
that fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians ! But 
how much more he insists upon that which our 
Lord's resurrection now demands of us. " If, 
then, ye were raised together with Christ, seek 
the things that are above, where Christ is, seated 
on the right hand of God ; " '^ Christ being raised 
from the dead dieth no more. . . . Even so 
reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, 
but alive unto God in Christ Jesus." It is in a 
manner well enough that we should understand 
the historical and philosophical questions involved 
in the resurrection.^ But let us never think 

1 I cannot but quote here from Frederic W. H. Myers 
(*' Modern Essays," Renan). What he says in this connection 
has the greater weight because of his singularly untrammelled 
temper of mind regarding all controverted questions : — 

" ' Phenomena of this kind/ it is sometimes said, * need 
not now be disproved, for they are disbelieved without formal 
disproof. Precisely so; they are disbelieved because they 
are traditionally supposed to be violations of natural law, 
and we know now that natural laws are never violated. But 
this argument has a flaw in it. For until such phenomena 
are not only disbelieved, but weighed and sifted, we cannot 
tell whether they are in truth violations of natural law 
or not. 

** It can hardly be expected that the common-sense of the 
public will permanently accept any of the present critical 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 183 

that this is our real business ; it is in one sense 
irrelevant. If the thing had been a delusion or a 
lie, it would have been dead these many hundred 
years ; but there is in some way an eternal power 
proceeding from that Judea of eighteen centuries 
ago, with its band of witnesses telling of One 
they had known who had died and risen again, — 
a power which sets the Person of Jesus apart as 

explanations of the alleged appearance of Christ after death. 
It will not accept the view of Strauss, according to which the 
' mythopoeic faculty ' creates a legend without an author and 
without a beginning ; so that when Saint Paul says, * He was 
seen of Cephas, then of the twelve,' he is repeating about 
acquaintances of his own an extraordinary assertion, which 
was never originated by any definite person on any definite 
grounds, but which somehow proved so persuasive to the 
very men who were best able to contradict it that they were 
willing to suffer death for its truth. Nor will the world be 
contented with the theory according to which Christ was 
never really killed at all, but was smuggled by some un- 
known disciples into the room where the Twelve sat at meat, 
and then disappeared unaccountably from the historic scene, 
after crowning a divine life with a bogus resurrection. Nor 
will men continue to believe — if anybody besides M. Renan 
believes it now — that the faithful were indeed again and 
again convinced that their risen Master was standing visibly 
among them, but thought this because there was an acciden- 
tal noise, or a puff of air, or even a strange atmospheric 
effect ! Paley's * Evidences ' is not a subtle book nor a 
spiritual book. Bat one wishes that the robust Paley with 
his ' twelve men of known probity ' were alive again to deal 
with hypotheses like this. The Apostles were not so much 
like a British jury as Paley imagined them. But they were 
more like a British jury than like a parcel of hysterical 
monomaniacs." 



184 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

unique. Our business with the resurrection is to 
pass on from the occurrence itself to the relation 
which this occurrence bears to the spiritual life 
of mankind, to our own spiritual life. Eealizing 
the power of eternal life, we have the surest evi- 
dence that the beginning of it all was not in a lie, 
a myth, an hallucination, but in that which after 
all is still the simplest and most reasonable to 
believe, — " the third day He rose again from 
the dead." Lacking that evidence, we are noth- 
ing profited by cartloads of apologetics. The 
best way to contend for the faith of the resurrec- 
tion, is to live steadfastly the risen life. 

So with all the other features of a ^^mirac- 
ulous " nature. Making them the centre of con- 
flict is to miss their true significance. They are 
to be taken as organic parts of the faith once for 
all delivered, from which we pass on to their 
inner meaning and power in the new life. It is 
that which must meet the enemies of the faith, 
and win the fight. 

Of one other article we would make particular 
mention, and that one of a rather different order 
from the preceding. The '^ Gospel of the Eesur- 
rection " soon passed into a Gospel of the Cruci- 
fixion. Eegarding the meaning of the cross men 
have reasoned and speculated much. The occur- 
rence itself affording no opening for discussion 
as to its historical credibility, the more did the 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 185 

"doctrinal'^ opportunity draw off the energies 
of men from that which concerned them more to 
that which concerned them less. Questions of 
the forensic bearings of the transaction in the 
court of heaven engaged men's minds to the ex- 
clusion of the power of the cross in the Chris- 
tian's daily life. Part of the faith it verily is 
that Christ died for our sins, that He is the 
Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the 
world. It may be well to study this great trans- 
action critically, on its various sides, in its 
various bearings ; but let us not for a moment 
suppose that this is our real business with it. 
Holding the faith of Him crucified is, not only 
to believe that Jesus of Nazareth came to His 
death in this manner, and that His dying thus 
bore some essential and mysterious relation to 
the counsels of Deity — which who will deny? — 
but rather, passing on from that, to crucify our- 
selves, as Saint Paul has it, we that are Christ's 
to crucify the flesh with the affections and lusts, 
always bearing about in our body the dying of 
the Lord Jesus. This it is, we think, to hold the 
faith of the Crucified. Anything less is not 
faith in the Crucified, but an- opinion regarding 
the crucifixion. And to contend earnestly for 
this faith is not to frame and vindicate even the 
most profoundly philosophical theory concerning 
Christ's sacrifice ; the foes of the faith are not 



186 CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 

intellectual, and they assail us where to be com- 
pelled to fight seems to us far less glorious, — in 
the motions of a heart gravitating constantly 
toward self-pleasing and vanity and worldly suc- 
cess, in the subtle temptations to neglect or 
slight the homely duties of every day and every 
place, in the thousand-fold besetments of the 
lower nature. He that '^ smites these foes by the 
merit of the holy cross '^ is the true champion 
of the Christian faith. 

Is it not sufficiently plain, then, that this faith 
is after all a v^ry simple and practical matter, — 
simple, as all greatest things are simple, and 
practical as all deepest things are practical ? It 
was for a great moral purpose that Jude wrote 
this strange, brief letter, with the exhortation of 
our text ; and it is for a great moral purpose that 
we ought to speak and move to-day as regards 
all questions of belief. This '^ faith once for all 
delivered unto the saints '' is one which no one 
holds save he who believes it true for himself, 
and in himself, and in all things he does, or 
plans, or meditates ; it is a faith for which no 
man earnestly contends save he who really holds 
it with the constant struggle of the world in his 
heart to make him only think or only say it; 
who will not be deceived into thinking that that 
may be true in his theology which is but par- 



CONTENDING FOR THE FAITH. 187 

tially true in his religion, or that what is true in 
his religion must not be too hard pressed in this 
practical world. To make this faith tell, to 
bring things to pass in our time and in our sur- 
roundings by the power of it, to get God's name 
hallowed, to make His kingdom come and get 
His will done on earth as it is in heaven, by 
virtue of believing in Him whom the Father 
sent, — this is to contend earnestly . for it. 

In the light of so urgent business in so great 
a cause, what becomes of our hot contentions of 
this present, over matters ranging in importance 
from the secondary to the infinitesimally trivial ? 

Does not the foundation stand sure ? Is not 
Jesus Christ the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever? And the once delivered faith — is it 
not Himself ? And is there any way to contend 
for Him at all, save by being true to Him ? 

*^But ye beloved," Jude continues, "building 
up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying 
in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love 
of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, unto eternal life." 

Grant this, Lord, unto us all. Amen. 



THE END. 



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